UCLA

Paying close sensorial attention to what sugar performs in cultural productions (from the 20th, 21st century) and site-specific landscapes (in the Greater Caribbean), this dissertation questions how the taste of and for sugar is (re)produced by and (re)produces racializing acts of “sweet” consumption, i.e., acts of racial tasting. Drawing from theories surrounding the performance of materiality, phenomenology, Black Feminist and Caribbean studies, the study specifically addresses how those enslaved/indentured to make sugar taste sweet become the visual markers by which a racial hierarchy is grounded, naturalized, ‘tasted,’ and consumed. In this study, I propose that designations such as race are not only predetermined, sensed, or felt by the visual or auditory but that they are also experienced and habituated orally by tasting—an internalized haptic experience that manifests on the tongue and, as I argue, incorporates both the physiological/gustatory and the rhetorical/aesthetic. By questioning sugar’s perceived ‘sweetness,’ I critically address how gustatory and aesthetic orientations have cultivated and naturalized the pleasurable consumption of racializing practices while also conceptualizing how unconsidered faculties of taste have the potential of broadening aesthetic perceptions.