Sugar: Literature’s Bitter, Bitter Commodity

Mishra, Sudesh R. (2025) Sugar: Literature’s Bitter, Bitter Commodity. In: Commodities and Literature. Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom, pp. 163-178. ISBN 9781009432344

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Abstract

Sugar as an industrial commodity has featured in colonial as well as postcolonial literary texts. On the one hand, it stimulates desire and, on the other, it induces terror and abjection. Its status as an object of desire hinges on colonial modes of surplus accumulation as celebrated by its literary apologists. It serves as the muse of plantation capital precisely because its global demand generates revenue for those invested in the expropriating instruments of Empire. The imagination of the postcolonial writer, in contrast, represents sugar as an exceptionally bitter commodity. For it speaks to a harrowing history of abduction, deceit, transportation, drudgery, degradation, murder, insanity, rape and penury. It denatures nature, ecologically, and dehumanizes humans, physically as well as psychically. It gives birth to a grotesque and unnerving disorder. This chapters discusses literary texts from Oceania and the Caribbean that revolve around sugar—a commodity implicated in slavery and indentured servitude.

Item Type:	Book Chapter
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Divisions:	School of Pacific Arts, Communication and Education (SPACE)
Depositing User:	Ms Shalni Sanjana
Date Deposited:	24 Mar 2026 23:34
Last Modified:	24 Mar 2026 23:34
URI:	https://repository.usp.ac.fj/id/eprint/15311

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