The Mediality of Sugar probes the potential of reading sugar as a mediator across some of the disciplinary distinctions in early twenty-first century research in the arts, literature, architecture, and popular culture. Selected artistic practices and material cultures of sugar across Europe and the Americas from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century are investigated and connected to the transcontinental and transoceanic history of the sugar plants cane and beet, their botanical and cultural dissemination, and global sugar capital and trade under colonialism and in decoloniality. The collection contributes to the vision of a Transnational and Postdisciplinary Sugar Studies.
Nadja Gernalzick, Dr. phil. habil. (1998, 2005), University of Mainz, is private lecturer in literature and media at that university and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Vienna. She has taught at universities in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria since 1998. Among her publications is Temporality in American Filmic Autobiography (2018).
Joseph Imorde, Weissensee School for Art and Design, Berlin, is Professor for Art History. He published on a wide range of topics, especially on Baroque Art and on the historiography of art.
Acknowledgements List of Illustrations and Tables Notes on Contributors
The Mediality of Sugar: Introduction Nadja Gernalzick
part 1: Sugar as Medium of Social Signification
1 Materiality, Medium, and Morality: The Colors of Sugar in Trade and Consumption in Europe Today Kerstin Poehls
2 Mediating Social Life: Confectionery as Cultural Objects in Sweden in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Ulrika Torell
3 The Stenographer’s Lunch Midori V. Green
4 Royal Cavities: Towards a Mediality of Sugar Joseph Imorde
5 Sweet Prosperity and Bitter Bondage: Caribbean Empowerment and Race in Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire (2012) Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad
part 2: Sugar in Art and Architecture
6 Architecture and Urban Form Derived from Sugar Production: Company Towns in Brazil from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century Gabriela Campagnol
7 Sugar Cubes That Revolutionized Art: Malevich’s Artistic Project as Interpreted by Leonid Tishkov in Kubvetschnosti (2012) Viola Hildebrand-Schat
8 “It Is at This Cost That You Eat Sugar in Europe:” The Desire for Justice and Moreau le Jeune’s Illustrations (1787) for Voltaire’s Candide ou l’optimisme (1759) Kathrin Baumeister
9 Sugar Cube Mission Models in California Primary Schools and the Whitewashing of Native American Labor Jamie Sierra Karnik
part 3: Outlook
10 “Sugar Is Not a Vegetable:” The Mediality of Sugar in Anthropocenic Entanglements Nadja Gernalzick
Appendix: Geography of World Sugar Production and History of Labor in Sugar: Maps and Graphs Nadja Gernalzick, with maps contributed by Gabriela Campagnol and Jamie Karnik
Index of Names
Specialists, post-graduate students, institutes, libraries in the fields Art History, Media Studies, Food Studies, Plant Studies, Cultural History, Architecture, Literary Studies, among others.