Sunday, January 26, 2020
Sweetness and Power | Intro-Ch.1
Throughout the introduction of Mintz's Sweetness and Power, he spends a few paragraphs on the sheer enrapturement that is felt within the Carribean with sugar cane. He discusses specifically Barrio Jauca (in Puerto Rico), where he mentions that he felt as though he was standing "in a sea of cane" (xviii). Mintz continues to describe how nearly every part of life is centered around sugar cane, despite Puerto Rico being only a small amount of the consumption of the good. When Mintz describes that even when looking around at the workers, a lot of them are also chewing on the cane, it paints a surreal picture of a life that is truly centered around one good. While it's clear that American society is just as focused more generally on Late Capitalism and revolves around its notions, when I tried to think of anything in modern America that compares to this exact enrapturement of Barrio Jauca with sugar cane, I drew a blank. Is there anything you can compare sugar cane to in our modern times here?
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One of the only things I can think of that has a similar hold on a country the way sugar cane did is coffee (which is also mentioned on page xvi in Sweetness and Power). Although it is not an American export, it is one of the main exports of Brazil. Brazil is responsible for one-third of the world’s coffee production. According to Ricardo M. Souza, coffee plantations cover about 10,000 square miles of land in Brazil and more than half of the country’s production of coffee comes from one particular region of the country. The Brazilian coffee industry also feeds into a huge internal and external market, and it is said that the people of Brazil really enjoy their coffee, as they are the largest consumers of coffee in the world (https://thebrazilbusiness.com/article/brazilian-coffee-industry and Benoit Daviron; Stefano Ponte, (2005). So, although it isn’t really American export, the enrapturement of Brazil with coffee can be compared to Barrio Jauca with sugar cane.
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