Cacao and cascadura: Energetic consumption and production in world-ecological literature

Deckard, Sharae

doi:10.1080/17449855.2017.1337686

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…It has long been gendered as feminine (Robertson 2010) and has emerged in its current form through the racialized exploitation of people who cultivate sugar and cocoa (Hackenesch 2017). There is also an important ecological dimension to its production and commodification (Deckard 2017). Studies of chocolate in English, Caribbean and Spanish literature have shown how these writings expose the abuse and violence in the history of chocolate production (Keyser 2017;Gamboa 2006).…”

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Chocolate and the French novel: modernity, language, nature

Mathias

2022

Modern & Contemporary France

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This article brings ecocritical and historical approaches together with literary analysis to provide the first in-depth analysis of chocolate in French novels. It argues that chocolate is a uniquely hybrid, indeterminate substance in both literal and figurative terms and it enables writers to ask questions about human nature and our status as civilized, textual beings. Examining examples from a range of writers-Stendhal, Huysmans, Verne and Nothomb-I show how chocolate highlights our paradoxical understanding of ourselves as both imbricated within nature through our material status and yet separated from it through our culture and especially through language and writing. Chocolate thus provides a fruitful tool for writers to think about textuality, modernity, and our relationship with nature.

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Chocolate and the French novel: modernity, language, nature

Mathias

2022

Modern & Contemporary France

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“…16 Thus far, contributions to the study of world-ecological literary analysis have concentrated on the 'aesthetics of commodity frontiers', 17 those intense zones of extraction and/or production that reorganise human and bio-physical natures for the increase of profit rates, but whose profit depends on the very exploitation, and potential exhaustion, of human labour and nonhuman natures: the plantation, the oil well, the mine, the oldgrowth forest. Critics have written about literary mediations of cacao extraction across the American hemisphere, 18 water regimes and hydropolitics in China and Latin America, 19 oil-driven imperialism and petrofiction in Scotland and Saudi Arabia, 20 and coal and opium in the British Empire. 21 In these essays, literary significations are argued to be profoundly occasioned by the socio-ecological transformations of capitalist development.…”

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World-Ecological Literature and the Animal Question

O’Key¹

2021

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In recent years, the Marxist method of world-literary theory has given birth to world-ecological literary criticism, a practice of materialist comparativism that analyses how literary texts register the environmental crises of capitalist modernity. Although its practitioners have penned incisive essays on literary engagements with the extraction and exhaustion of resources like water, oil and cacao, there has been no work published on industrialized animal agriculture and the global expansion of meat production. This is not a simple omission, but rather a product of Marxism’s longstanding ambivalence towards animals. With this argument as the foundation of this essay, I set out to both extend and challenge the world-ecological analytic by paying attention to literary registrations of meat production across different socio-ecological regimes. I do so by turning to Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s 2016 novel, Règne animal, published in English as Animalia in 2019. I show how the novel embraces forms of literary naturalism which, by depicting farm workers and their animals as jointly expendable to the laws of profitability, registers the meatification of France across two centuries. Yet if naturalism ultimately depicts human characters who are powerless to stop predetermined natural laws, then to what extent does Animalia truly challenge the conditions of factory farming it wishes to expose? Put differently, what are the affordances and limitations of naturalist form for critically mapping factory farming?

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Introduction: Global, Postcolonial, and World Literatures

Loughry

2020

The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis

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Cacao and cascadura: Energetic consumption and production in world-ecological literature

Cited by 7 publications

References 9 publications

Chocolate and the French novel: modernity, language, nature

Chocolate and the French novel: modernity, language, nature

World-Ecological Literature and the Animal Question

Introduction: Global, Postcolonial, and World Literatures

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