Where only ghosts and tourists come to dine : the Creole and Cajun cuisines of Southern Louisiana and the commodification of history

This thesis interrogates the ways that the material biographies of the Creole and Cajun cuisines of southern Louisiana undermine and ultimately betray the discursive fictions that they are typically required to perform in popular culinary discourse. The thesis begins with an investigation of the contemporary literature concerning the commodity, commodity fetishism and consumption, particularly in the arena of cuisine, in order to better understand how the commodification of cuisine enables specific fantasies regarding American colonial history related to race and ethnicity. After elaborating the concept of the biography of the object, the thesis studies six specific recipes in detail. The historical trajectories of key ingredients in the recipes are traced in order to explore the ways the development of cuisine in 18 th -century Louisiana related to the violent interaction between French and Spanish colonists, Native American peoples, and the enslaved West African labour force. The thesis concludes by reconceptualizing the cuisines of Louisiana as diasporic cuisines

The history of Atlantic science : collective reflections from the 2009 Harvard seminar on Atlantic history

For the purposes of this review essay, which seeks to capture the spirit of those early conversations in Cambridge, we propose calling the assemblages and interactions of the peoples, objects, institutions, and techniques that resulted in and from colonization during the early modern period ‘‘Atlantic science.’’ We recognize, of course, that not all colonization was bounded by an Atlantic frame. However, in terms of timing, scale, and scope, no other cluster of imperial enterprises can be compared with the conquest and colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. What made colonization in the Atlantic unique was that it involved the voluntary migration of more than two million Europeans, the forced migration of more than ten million Africans, the creation of a vast network of interconnected centers, and the political incorporation ofmuch of the hemisphere into the Western world, all between 1500 and 1825. Nothing of this scale has happened anywhere else in the early modern period. The Atlantic Ocean, rather than Europe, became the center of that world. And so, we see the Atlantic world as an outcome of this colonizing process

Mainstreaming African Diasporic Foodways When Academia Is Not Enough

More than a decade after Britain's bicentennial commemoration of the 1807 Abolition Act to end the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Scotland still struggles to reconcile her colonial past. Unlike in North America, historical archaeology centered on the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade is still highly marginalized in British academia. Furthermore, Scotland's roles in slave-based economies is only recently being considered a relevant area of historical studies. This paper emerges from my evolving perspective as a Black American scholar and resident in the United Kingdom, as I strive to create intellectual spaces in and outside of academia. Through civic engagement, I use my work on African diasporic foodways in the French Caribbean to link with a similar material basis of resistance in the British Caribbean and engage British audiences whose connections to Atlantic slavery are yet to be fully recognized