The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery, and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean
Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Africana Studies Kim F. Hall’s The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean (The University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2025) centers the complicated history of sugar in order to ask what lies beyond its narrative of pleasure. Hall explores how the unique emphasis the English placed on confections as a marker of status and national identity in the seventeenth century offers a framework for grappling with changing notions of race, gender, labor, and domesticity that shaped early colonization. Drawing from a wide range of early Anglo-Caribbean texts—from cookbooks and banquet menus to economic poetry, to maps and treatises on plantation labor and health—Hall uncovers colonial discourses deployed across representations of Caribbean colonization and slavery. Working across the fields of Early Modern, Critical Race, and Food Studies, Hall offers us the language of plantation aesthetics in order to expose the violence ingrained in sugar that is made to disappear through the pleasure derived from whiteness, purity, and perfection.
Kim Hall will be joined by Patricia A. Matthew (Montclair State University), Debapriya Sarkar (University of Connecticut), Kyla Wazana Tompkins (University at Buffalo), and Jennifer Morgan (New York University) and the conversation will be moderated by Tapiwa Gambura.
ACCESSIBILITY
This event is free, open to the public, and will stream online on BCRW’s YouTube page. ASL interpretation will be provided. Registration is preferred.
Kim F. Hall is Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College. Professor Hall’s research and teaching cover Renaissance/Early Modern Literature and Culture, Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Studies, Slavery Studies, Visual Culture, Food Studies, and Digital Humanities. Her first book, Things of Darkness was the first to use a black feminist approach to interpret Renaissance literature and helped create a field now known as Premodern Critical Race Studies. She has received fellowships from the ACLS, the Newberry Library, the National Humanities Center and the Schomburg Center for African American Culture as well Barnard’s Tow Award for Innovative Pedagogy for her work with the Ntozake Shange Collection at Barnard College. She was also the Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in London
Professor Hall previously held the Thomas F.X. Mullarkey Chair in English at Fordham University before coming to Barnard College in 2006 to direct the Africana Studies program. Under her stewardship, the Africana Studies Program at Barnard conducted the college’s first cluster hire, which became the center of Africana departmentalization. She developed the program’s new focus on Africana Gender Studies and co-edited with Christine Cynn, Rewriting Dispersal: Africana Gender Studies. She also directed the college’s Middle Passage Initiative, which gave students opportunities to engage in dialogue across the Atlantic about the history of the Middle Passage and the literary response to that history. Under the auspices of that project, she led student trips to Accra, Ghana and Charleston, South Carolina.
She is currently working on a book “Othello Was My Grandfather”: Shakespeare and Race in the African Diaspora and is the subject of an exhibit at Barnard “Weaving Dreams: The Quilts of Kim F. Hall” that is part of the Zora Neale Hurston Centennial celebration of 100 years of Black women at Barnard. That exhibit will be in Barnard’s Milstein Center through June 2026.
Patricia Matthew is Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University where she teaches courses on the History of the Novel and Romantic abolitionist culture. She writes about Regency-era literature and culture for scholars and the public in journals and publications including Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Women’s Writing, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Times Literary Supplement, and Slate. She co-edited special issues of Romantic Pedagogy Commons and European Romantic Review, and edited a special issue of Studies in Romanticism. She is also a specialist in diversity and inclusion in higher education and the editor of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (UNC Press, 2016). She co-edits the Oxford University Press book series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. She is director of the Race and Regency Lab and editor of Penguin Random House’s 250th anniversary editions of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. Winner of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the British Association for Romanticism Studies, and the Folger Shakespeare Institute, she is currently editing Austen’s Mansfield Park for Norton and writing a book about abolition, material culture, and gender for Princeton University Press.
Jennifer L. Morgan is The Silver Family Professor of History in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis and the Department of History at New York University. In 2024 she was the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” Award and was the Andrew R. Mellon Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2024-25. She is the author of the prize-winning Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021) and of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Her articles include “Reproductive Racial Capitalism” in a special issue of History of the Present co-written and co-edited with Alys Weinbaum; “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” in Small Axe; and “Experiencing Black Feminism” in Deborah Gray White’s edited volume Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2007). She is currently working on The Eve of Slavery—a project about slavery and freedom in the seventeenth century that centers around Elizabeth Key—a black woman who successfully sued for her freedom in Virginia in 1656. In conjunction with that project, she serves as an Executive Producer for Key to Freedom, a narrative film project written and directed by her daughter Emma “Zinha” Morgan-Bennett.
Debapriya Sarkar is Associate Professor of English and Maritime Studies at the University of Connecticut. She researches and teaches at the intersections of early modern literature, literature/science studies, ecocriticism, maritime studies, premodern critical race studies, women’s writing, and postcolonial theory. She is the author of Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023). This project has been supported by fellowships from the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. She is currently working on a second book project on early modern poetics and racecraft and (with Hillary Eklund) on an interdisciplinary public humanities project, Waterways, that aims to foster community-driven, place-based, and historically informed initiatives on environmental studies, centered on bodies of water and the lives they connect and sustain.
Kyla Wazana Tompkins is Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. Tompkins is a scholar of 19th-century U.S. literature with a continuing interest in the relationship between food, race, biopower and culture. Professor Tompkins is the author of two books: Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (NYU Press, 2012) and Deviant Matter (NYU Press, 2024). Her 2012 book, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century, received the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize from the American Studies Association and was named Best Book in Food Studies Award, presented by the Association for the Study of Food and Society. She is also the managing editor of Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies, which came out with NYU Press in 2021 and has an accompanying podcast.
Tapiwa Gambura BC ’24 is a doctoral student in the English department at Yale University. Her research attends to histories of the body, and ecological modes of thinking in the vast early Americas. She has held fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library as well as at the Newberry Library where she contributed to their 2023 exhibition “Seeing Race Before Race.” Recent work includes a forthcoming essay co-written with Kim F. Hall on abolition and corporeality in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.