I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism [sic], racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho' good eatin'.’
– Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White MasksI am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea.
– Stuart Hall, ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities’Against the Grain
Samuel Johnson's uneasy comments on the blasé evocation of the transatlantic slave trade in Book IV of The Sugar-Cane were clearly prescient: within little more than two decades, his remarks were being echoed and expanded in the campaign for the abolition of the trade, which officially began in 1787, but did not finally realize its aims for a further twenty years. This chapter examines some of the writings which emerged in the early phases of the movement, focusing on what might be called the politics of consumption and, in particular, the provocative identification of the sugar-eater as cannibal, a common discursive motif during the period.
Two texts in which this identification is set in play are William Fox's classic anti-sugar pamphlet, ‘An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum’ (1791), and Andrew Burn's far less familiar response to Fox in ‘A Second Address to the People of Great Britain: Containing a New, and Most Powerful Argument to Abstain from the Use of West India Sugar. By an Eye Witness to the Facts Related’ (1792).
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