Introduction

Rum Histories: How Did We Get Here?

The current range of signification for rum depends on a set of associations inherited from the history of plantation slavery in the Caribbean. These associations were largely in place by 1800 and consolidated by the time of emancipation. Later, as British Caribbean colonies negotiate independence, or greater independence, from the Crown after World War II, the symbolic implications of rum remain in place to characterize sociopolitical conditions in emerging Caribbean states.11 First, the West Indies—the Caribbean in general—has been associated with excessive drinking long before tourism promotional materials. Alcohol was a pervasive feature of life in the West Indies, although this situation was not unusual at a time when water safety was not guaranteed. Europeans and Africans in the West Indies drank rum for medicinal or nutritional benefit as well as for the other well-established reasons: tradition, celebration/ritual, and solace. However, according to Frederick Smith’s excellent study Caribbean Rum (2005), early accounts from travelers and planters establish the drinking patterns among planters, poor whites, and slaves to be excessive according to European norms. These accounts may be biased by ignorance of African drinking customs (F. Smith 109) or of the ways European drinking patterns shifted to accommodate conditions in the West Indies; however, they create a pattern that persisted as stereotypes of louche, drunk planters (fig. 1) and dangerously intoxicated slaves.12

Rum also played an integral role in the Black Atlantic economy; it deserves its iconic status as a lubricant for the plantation system. Traders exchanged casks of rum for human beings, thus commodifying people in the interests of imperial trade. As Jay Coughtry explains in The Notorious Triangle (1981), Rhode Island rum-men traded rum for slaves in Africa, and then slaves for molasses in the West Indies. “Frequently,” he states, “molasses served as a partial payment for the slaves, thereby making the circle of Caribbean involvement complete. Viewed from this perspective, the slave trade was simply the most profitable method of selling rum, Rhode Island’s most important export” (21). African trading partners were neither passive consumers nor unlimited markets for rum, and slave traders monitored demand and preferences when supplying ships.13 West Africans could profit from reselling rum they received in partial payment for slaves or as wages (81), and African traders saw rum as a high-status drink that amplified their standing in the community (83). Coastal traders also discriminated between varieties of alcohol, negotiating for rum—particularly Rhode Island rum—instead of other alcohols (Ambler 81–82). Thus, as Ian Williams states, “rum soon became a double enslaver, both depending on the toil of slaves to make and being the main trade item to buy slaves in West Africa” (90). The importance of rum to the slave trade appears in its centrality to boycotts during the British abolition movement (Midgeley 35–40); any number of abolition poems capitalize on the fact that sugar and rum could contain the blood of enslaved people.14 The Royal Navy, which policed and enabled the slave trade, supplemented the naval diet with a daily rum ration, introduced in 1731 and discontinued in 1970.15

Rum also is central to the operation of a plantation’s internal economy. Before emancipation, planters supplemented the slave diet with rum and, after emancipation, wages were often partially paid in rum (see F. Smith 103–4, 175–76). Rum served as preparation for or a reward for arduous tasks, and it was used to accustom people to enslavement (103–4).16 After emancipation, plantation owners manipulated the price and availability of rum to shift indentured South Asian workers away from marijuana because they “were as interested in creating a captive consumer class as they were in enhancing the labor of those already working under indenture” (Angrosino 102).17 Even when the rum trade declined, the association of rum with the economic prosperity of the West Indies remained.18

Rum circulates through local plantation finances and global trade routes lubricated by overlapping cultural taboos and shared uses of alcohol among enslaved people, overseers, planters, traders, sailors, and regular folk. In the twentieth century, this combination of the ludic and the vicious provides a moral and cultural correlative for problems that are primarily historical and economic. As decolonization began, the systemic weakness and dependence of individual islands, which arose from long-term extraction of natural and human resources, rendered the transition to independence difficult. British control over the West Indian economy in the mid-twentieth century was still tight, and English firms planned to retain their assets through any transition to independence. Although sugar no longer produced the extraordinary revenues it had in the eighteenth century, it was still a lucrative trade item, particularly during wartime, when access to foreign sugar supplies was limited by hostilities and the Ministry of Food purchased the entire crop (Stahl 27). West Indian sugar imports to England were subsidized by the British government, giving it a price preference over foreign sugar.19 In her 1951 study The Metropolitan Organization of British Colonial Trade, Kathleen M. Stahl reports that the sugar industry of which rum is a subsidiary was still headquartered in England (32). She notes, “A high proportion of the century-old firms engaged in colonial trade are family businesses. . . . They show a general tenacity in maintaining their offices either on, or as near as possible to, their original sites in the City” (7). This economic interest merged into political influence with Parliament, as the executive of the West India Committee “is still to a large extent composed of members of the leading firms controlling sugar production in the West Indies” (15). Thus, those with strong economic self-interest maintained an official political role in West Indian policymaking; the West Indies is the only colonial area under this type of administrative control.20

As a product already imbued with degradation and shame, rum conveniently focuses affects surrounding the difficulties attending the transition from colony to independent state, and there are connections between discourses surrounding alcoholism in the region and the emergence from direct rule. Historian Jan Rogoziński has reported that, as negotiations for decolonization proceeded in the 1960s and 1970s, British officials “were convinced that the smaller colonies were too poor to survive as viable states” and thus planned to introduce self-government gradually (267). Even earlier, Perham had pointed to the uniqueness of each colony as a warning against “some generalised ‘colonial’ plan” (51). While she noted that some West Indian islands “have less of the handicaps in the race for self-government than others,” the general backwardness of the colonies in terms of education, resources, and institutions undermines their ability to support and supply an independent democratic government (52). The British also favored a federated government that would combine the resources of the many islands. Federation efforts failed because Jamaica and Trinidad, which were developing local resources (bauxite and oil, respectively), “feared that their economies would be drained by the poorer islands of the eastern Caribbean” (Rogoziński 269).21 Despite these logical explanations for potential weakness in new West Indian states, the failure of West Indian islands to achieve self-government was also seen as a national or regional tragic flaw. According to John Darwin, fractious negotiations led the British government to conclude that “the British West Indies were a monument to colonial failure: poverty-stricken, politically backward, economically as well as politically fragmented, with a golden past and a leaden future” (217).

Key to these pessimistic expectations, which might also be styled self-fulfilling prophecies or wishful thinking, are the trajectories of Haiti and Cuba, island polities that escape colonial control. According to Laurent Dubois, the Haitian revolt of 1791 achieved a remarkable feat: “The expansion of citizenship beyond racial barriers despite the massive political and economic investment in the slave system at the time” (3). Eventually, it led to Haitian independence in 1804. Although Haiti inspires anticolonial resistance as a “romance of revolutionary overcoming” (Dalleo 15), its struggles—often, but not solely, a product of Western manipulation and racism—serve as an object lesson for the importance of economic independence to liberation.22 In the twentieth century, Cuba provides another failed state narrative despite achieving independence in 1959 and becoming, as foreign policy specialist Walter Russell Mead admits, a “powerful voice” resisting US foreign policy in the region and the world (29). Yet even where a Caribbean state earns praise, it still, in choosing Communism over capitalism, gets independence wrong.

As the United States emerges as the dominant force in the Caribbean Basin, popular media and government policy characterize the region as an uncooperative, unproductive thorn in the side of a progressive postwar world (barring its existence as a tropical paradise). The United States had been heavily invested in the West Indies during World War II, maintaining a series of bases under an agreement with England.23 Robert Freeman Smith, in a Twayne general overview of US relations and policy in the Caribbean, reports that after World War I US interest waned, and policy took on the form of “ambiguity and confusion.”24 President Franklin Roosevelt was “perplexed” by the failure of New Deal programs to bring stability and growth to Puerto Rico, which he attributed to faulty leadership and overpopulation (R. F. Smith 35). Texts about US-Caribbean relations chronicle a familiar oscillation between negligence and officious interference. George Black, writing in 1988, explains that the problem with US policy toward the Caribbean is “a kind of recurrent historical amnesia”: “When there was no crisis, or when the crisis did not directly involve the United States, it was as if the country in question had simply ceased to exist” (80). Other sources have characterized the attitude of the United States as “reactive and cautious” (Soderlund 157), and many note that Cold War concerns, which reached peak intensity with the Cuban Revolution of 1959, often skewed the commitment to democratization in the region (Sunshine 231). President Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative, designed to promote free trade and discourage radical experiments like those of the New Jewel Party in Grenada, “will create some beneficiaries, but these are more likely to be U.S. corporations than Caribbean people” (Deere et al. 182).

The prominent image of Caribbean states remains one of instability, extremism, privation, and profligacy. Supriya Nair remarks that “most postcolonies are newsworthy to the Western media only when some natural or political disaster strikes,” yet the Caribbean is marketed as a locale characterized by “decadent hedonism” (“Expressive Countercultures” 72). Violence, for example, is one of two common denominators found in a survey of media coverage of events in the Caribbean during the 1990s (Soderlund 162). This pattern is consistent with earlier depictions in popular films of the 1970s and 1980s (Black 123, 141), in which “Central America and the Caribbean were now just places where people went bananas” (123). Richard Nixon, following a vice-presidential trip to Haiti under Duvalier, called the nation “a picture in poverty and pregnancy” (qtd. in R. F. Smith 52). The United States tends to approach the Caribbean Basin with the idea that it must monitor, and occasionally act, to preserve strategic interests, but that what happens to these island polities should not really be a US problem.

These attitudes evince an inverse civilizing mission: having invested time and money to gift the islands with enlightenment and conceded readiness for self-determination, former imperial governments expect gratitude and repayment—and peace and quiet. Saidiya Hartman’s discussion of the rhetoric of debt surrounding emancipation in the United States analogizes to the West Indies: “The transition from slavery to freedom introduced the free agent to the circuits of exchange through this construction of already accrued debt, an abstinent present, and a mortgaged future. In short, to be free was to be a debtor—that is, obliged and duty-bound to others” (131). Hartman figures the individual burden as both behavioral, requiring postures of gratitude and worthiness, and financial, because freedom has a cost. Each person and each sociopolitical unit are now “obliged” and “duty-bound” to behave worthily of investments that are constructed as already made by metropolitan governments and do not account for the wealth generated by extracting it from people (enslaved labor) and the island environment. Never mind that, as Deere and her colleagues explain, postwar international lending entities “have reinforced traditional patterns of subordination in the relationship of Caribbean economies to metropolitan centers” arising from the days of plantation slavery and indenture (7). Further, Hartman’s middle adjective, “abstinent,” provides the moral sting: the first and last adjectives are contractual and financial, but “abstinent” implies a code of behavior. In such language, Hartman signals how the register of morality imposes narratives of profligacy, incompetence, corruption, and indulgence on polities emerging from colonization.25 This logic leads to decreased empathy for Caribbean locations when natural disasters exacerbate extant financial and infrastructure problems, as when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico and the president quickly transferred blame to the island (Glanz and Robles).

In Hartman’s word “abstinent,” denotational meaning spreads into more generalized beliefs about behavior and attitude. Thus, drinking—and, more particularly, rum drinking—whether excessive or routine, gets mapped onto and naturalizes a range of dysfunction with roots in broader effects of colonization. These attitudes are linked in discourses about drinking in Caribbean societies and applied by external observers. In 1957, M. H. Beaubrun spoke on the radio and later published in the Caribbean Medical Journal a call to understand alcoholism as a “social” problem with immense costs for Trinidad (137). He grants the utility of alcohol in generating sociability and relaxation, but he decries the cost of overindulgence: “Trinidad’s bill for alcoholism is round about six million dollars” (138) in lost productivity and medical expenses. Beaubrun subscribes to the idea that alcoholism is “an incurable illness” (138), but he attempts to excite communal awareness by noting that the social costs are not private or individual; they affect the country, sapping it of resources and threatening future productivity. In a study of Barbados, Graham Dann writes: “In the context of a developing country some may find it disturbing that approximately 1 in 5 drinkers spent at least 10% or more of their discretionary income on alcohol. In a few extreme cases there were individuals spending the equivalent of their entire earnings on drink” (29). Janet Stoute and Kenneth Ifill also comment on the costs of the rum shop and male drinking for the development of the society of Barbados in the postcolonial era: “Expenditure on alcohol severely reduces a source of potential investment. Knowledge of the extent of the phenomenon may also seriously reduce the inflow of capital from overseas, thereby affecting local employment and consequent possibility of development” (165).

A more recent World Bank study comments that “the poor in developing countries perceive alcohol use—particularly among men—as detrimental to their well-being and their efforts to build human and social capital” (Pyne et al. 1). Taken out of the immediate context of individual effects, these remarks feed into racialized temperance narratives. In their introduction to The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature, David S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal emphasize the connection between abolition and temperance movements in the United States in the nineteenth century, noting that the enslavement of the personal will under slavery was mapped onto the enslavement of the will to the bottle (5).26 Nineteenth- and twentieth-century temperance efforts focused on the degradation wrought by alcohol and thus “helped magnify the evils of the slave trade” (F. Smith 97).27 Denise Herd, who has written extensively on alcohol use in Black communities, notes that “temperance workers drew vivid parallels between enslavement to a master and bondage to alcohol” (“Ambiguity” 155); simultaneously, she states elsewhere, images of the “drunken black brute” encouraged restrictions on the sale and consumption of liquor to Black people during enslavement, after emancipation, and throughout Prohibition (“Paradox of Temperance” 367). These discourses were carried through the Caribbean, as Brian Moore and Michele A. Johnson report in their study of late nineteenth-century Jamaican temperance campaigns. In Jamaica, they write, these campaigns are “to some degree racialized” and were largely rejected because the promoters sought to enforce an “imported moral code” (156).

In discussions of alcoholism and temperance in the Caribbean, problems of personal will and responsibility intersect with perceived problems of cultural will and responsibility that lead to failed or weak modern polities. This confluence enables an economy of reading, meaning both a shorthand and a set of protocols, that flows across discourses that engage the Caribbean. Histories of extraction and exploitation, while acknowledged, lose purchase on analyses of present conditions in favor of racialized, moralistic stereotypes. The history of rum in the Caribbean is part of two economic phenomena, plantation monoculture (single-crop agriculture) and slavery, that created economic and political vulnerability as British direct rule mutated into other forms and ceded influence to other state actors—notably, the United States—after World War II. Superficially, the claim that West Indian states are dysfunctional (a judgment subject to perception as well) because people there drink too much appears ridiculous, but representing drinking habits captures affective responses to the unresolved contradictions of decolonization, marking a pivot where historical or economic explanations become moral or cultural, and vice versa. Rum’s multifaceted semiotic associations give rise, paradoxically, to a convenient evacuation of specific reference, creating a vacuum in which power operates. The next sections trace the nodes of reference that flexibly attach and detach from rum in order to deflect acknowledgment of the burdens colonialism leaves with contemporary subjects and states.

Foundations of Rum Poetics 1: Drunkenness, Disease Models, and Moral Stigma

The specifics of rum’s history as a Caribbean product merge with a more general history of drinking customs. These customs, especially as they apply to drinking judged excessive, are inflected by class, race, and gender, and they are largely shared across the areas dealt with in this study. Cross-culturally, these ideas are baked in. To unseat this dominant narrative, this section lays out the common evaluation models for excessive alcohol use and then counters them with anthropological cross-cultural studies of drinking behavior. Dominant public health and popular understandings of drinking encourage and reinforce moral stigma generally. When academics and policymakers discuss drinking, they discuss drinking as a problem to be deplored—even condemned. In other words, “drinking” means excessive drinking or alcoholism rather than normative cultural behavior. The construction of alcohol consumption as a problem currently rests on the disease model of alcoholism, with its attendant focus on drinking as a social problem. This model of alcoholism, widely known and accepted in popular contexts, surmounts the moral “disease of the will” model that prevailed from the nineteenth century through the Prohibition period.28 While the stigma on problem drinking retains its force, the emphasis in discourse surrounding treatment has shifted from moralizing to therapeutic. In this scenario, excessive alcohol use remains individuated to the person—addiction—or to specific social contexts (e.g., fraternities). Although there is a general awareness of larger cultural context, the focus remains on fixing a localized abnormality: drinking perceived as excessive and dangerous.

The prevalence of this model inhibits understanding drinking in broader cultural terms.29 In the late 1990s, the Social Issues Research Centre reported that “dysfunctional drinking” rather than normative drinking habits continued to dominate the research and public-policy agenda (SIRC). Stigmatizing drinking limits the range of analysis and distorts the role of alcohol in culture in several ways: first, the presumption that all drinking is potentially excessive and damaging begs the question of definition;30 second, we overlook the broader context in which judgments about what constitutes inappropriate alcohol use are made; and, third, the personalization of stigma deflects attention from the institutional and economic investments in perpetuating this discourse.31

The strong tendency to stigmatize alcohol consumption perceived as excessive has enabled corporations and governments to distribute alcohol deliberately to gain power over indigenous and/or colonized subjects, expropriate their resources, and then stigmatize them, as individuals and groups, as feckless, unproductive, morally lax others. Anthropologists who have examined the introduction of rum specifically include Marcia Langton, whose discussion of the stereotype of the “drunken Aborigine” in Australia asks “who profits” from the purveyance of alcohol to aboriginal groups (199). She concludes that “some” social scientists need “to consider the role of the Western imagination, and their own imaginings, in some of their notions about contemporary Aboriginal society as dysfunctional” (205). June Nash chronicles the relationship between the promotion of binge-drinking rituals in Chiapas and “anesthetizing Indians to the injustice in which they were held captive” (628). Michael Wagner investigates the ethnic segmentation of the retail trade in postemancipation British Guiana to discover that the “colonial elite” promoted the control of the rum trade by Portuguese immigrants to suppress the Creole population: with the Portuguese as a “buffer group” (415), “the resultant ‘new society’ was as near a reconstitution of the old slave society as was feasible” (407). In these analyses, anthropologists agree that constructing drinking behaviors as pathological often enable exploitative material relations grounding the production, distribution, and consumption of alcohol. Thus, the ability to position drinking as excessive or inappropriate has enormous power to deflect attention from economic and political injustice through vocabularies of personal or cultural shame.

The idea—or, one might say, ideology—of drinking pathologies traverses North American, English, and Anglophone Caribbean interpretive strategies because these areas broadly share drinking norms around gender, though they divide along race. In each region, social drinking rises in general acceptability after World War II, yet, whether regular, heavy, or alcoholic, drinking is naturalized among men; women’s drinking always requires an explanation.32 Strictures against women’s social drinking slowly relax, but the cautionary figure of the “drunken slut” persists as a control on female behavior. Alcohol research expands in the postwar years, but its goals largely reflect this naturalized gender divide in alcohol consumption: research on women’s experience lags behind studies of men. Differences among ethnic and racial groups are rarely studied before the 1980s,33 and research into alcohol use and abuse in the Caribbean Basin is also sparse.34 In the Caribbean as in the United States, drinking by men in groups outside the home remains an important—sometimes lamented—part of male socialization, identity formation, and community. Female presence in public drinking places like bars and pubs is also more accepted, but the rum shops of the Caribbean remain a male preserve, and Caribbean women tend to abstain at higher rates than women to their north.35

Two conclusions can be noted here: first, stereotypes about gender, race, class, and ethnicity strongly affect the assessment of alcohol use. Second, all these cultures value drinking as it encourages sociability and community while strongly stigmatizing consumption perceived to threaten economic and communal health—that is, alcoholism.36 Similarities across cultures of the Atlantic create the impression that drinking habits and behaviors are essential, mandated by physiology rather than culturally constructed. In other words, we know what drunk means. Alcohol promotes disinhibition, which traditionally leads to two simultaneous and paradoxical judgments: drunken people are both more themselves (in vino veritas) and less so—drunk people do not appear in control of their actions and words. Alcohol use raises questions of will, (self-) control, and truth that resonate at individual and societal levels. Does intoxication represent an abominable failure of will, a congenital disposition to dysfunction, or a genial insouciance, an unpretending conviviality? The answers to these questions depend on who is doing the judging, about whom, where, and when—yet the notion that drunkenness could be learned behavior, a form of social performance, or a cultural construction, remains uncommon in mainstream thinking despite fifty years of anthropological research indicating otherwise.

In Drunken Comportment (1969), Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton lay out a theory that behavior under the influence of alcohol is contingent and learned rather than innate and physiological. MacAndrew and Edgerton make two major claims—still largely accepted—that undermine “conventional wisdom” about the effects of alcohol on human behavior.37 First, their cross-cultural review of anthropological studies demonstrates that alcohol impairs sensorimotor skills, but psychological response varies considerably based on context. The presumptive “disinhibiting effect” (36) of alcohol on behavior is, they claim, contingent.38 The attribution of “all other sorts of drunken ‘incompetencies’” to alcohol, and “thus similarly unintentional and similarly beyond the drinker’s voluntary control,” results from social training rather than physiological fact (170). Second, across cultures, “drunkenness . . . takes on the flavor of ‘time out’ from many of the otherwise imperative demands of everyday life” (90). What people do under the influence of alcohol is a) not under their control and b) does not count. (Unless it does, of course.) Paradoxically, the presence of alcohol labels a situation as out of bounds for critical analysis and interpretation. In situations involving alcohol, MacAndrew and Edgerton stress that “not only can the drinker explain away his drunken misbehavior to himself . . . those around him too can decide, or can be made to see, that his drunken transgressions ought not—or at least, need not—be taken in full seriousness” (169). Alcohol functions under erasure, its meanings somehow apparent and impervious to analysis.

The provisional nature of the phrase “or at least, need not” calls for an analysis of power and agency as they impinge on the evaluation of drinking behaviors in specific contexts. “When looking at the drink question,” writes James Nicholls in The Politics of Alcohol, “we are rarely looking at simple moral panics but we are almost invariably looking at ways in which concerns over drink also reveal other, less explicit, social values, assumptions, and beliefs” (254–55). Nor is alcoholic “time-out” simply a matter of the amalgam of items we might call “culture”: Anthony Marcus argues, extending and altering MacAndrew and Edgerton, that intensive regimens of state regulation for all sectors of alcohol production, distribution, and consumption shape the availability and location of alcohol’s “time-out.” Paradoxically, the freedom from social control signified by alcohol consumption is highly scripted, heavily supervised, and carefully managed, not only by conventional beliefs but also by state regulation. The times one feels most free from social control could be, in fact, moments when one is most clearly governed by systemic, institutional forces. The notion of “time-out” also implies its syntactic reverse: “out of time.” In the sense that alcohol marks a zone of freedom from familial and institutional demands, it is also available—as a signifier—to depress or repress historical implications of the past in the present.

Rum poetics bridges this gap, progressing toward libations as a figure for readings that recognize the past in accounting for present relations. Libations consecrate communal purpose, often by reference to ancestors (recently or anciently deceased) or gods. As an interpretive strategy, libations flood alcoholic time-out with shared history. The effect of establishing recognition of the other(s) makes of a gap a link where material and social relations could transform while acknowledging how consistently, and for what reasons, such opportunities may be lost or ignored.

Foundations of Rum Poetics 2: Rum as a Commodity in Anglo-Atlantic Consumer Culture

The figure of libations replaces a more superficial consumption model prevalent even when authors overtly canvas exploitation and violence as part of rum’s brand. As a commodity, rum is part of “a general imaginary of the Caribbean totality” as defined by Mimi Sheller (7) and “a cultural symbol” tightly wed to the Caribbean even though rum is produced in any number of locations.39 Perusing tour guides of the time provides adequate proof of rum’s specific association with regional culture. Holiday’s 1973 guide is typical in stating, “In the Caribbean the drink is rum. Period. . . . You are bound to feel out of step unless you join the rum bibbers at least part of the time” (31). Fodor’s 1960 Guide to the Caribbean, Bahamas, and Bermuda evokes the taboos with the imperative: “Demon Rum. . . . is the national drink of the Caribbean” (70). Yet Sheller’s claim of a “totality” of Caribbean-affiliated products (from zombies to bananas) that creates a “general imaginary” is important because she captures how dissemination or substitution can weaken the politics of a poetics centered on a specific commodity: If any number of products can symbolize “the Caribbean,” how is the specific significance of rum secured and justified?

Similarly, a spate of commodity sagas about rum create a continuum of equivalent consumers that suppresses ethical concerns. While not silent on the score of slavery, these sagas end optimistically by celebrating the commodity’s ability to connect a diverse, global world—past and present. The conclusion to Charles Coulombe’s Rum: The Epic History of the Drink That Conquered the World (2004) is a case in point: “So the next time you hold a glass of rum or a rum cocktail in your hand, think of all who came before you, who made it possible for you to lift the beverage to your lips. Planters and slaves, pirates and sailors, World War I Tommies and voodoo priestesses, rum-runners and African kings, missionary priests and Yankee traders all played their part, hate them or love them, in bringing this nectar to you. And as you drink, know that you yourself are joining their company” (262).

Coulombe draws on celebratory drinking rituals—the toast—to acknowledge past injustice, but he positions the contemporary consumer as a knowing, yet innocent, beneficiary of a historical parade of individual consumers. In separating individual consumers from the systems that govern their relationship to consumer goods, Coulombe illustrates a convention of commodity sagas in which individuality and subjectivity are held in tension. Bruce Robbins narrates the phenomenon as follows: “What a wondrous system this is, you are told, that has brought to your doorstep or breakfast table all these things you never would have known existed, yet things without which you would not, you suddenly realize, be yourself” (456).40 Your individuality is a product of a system, but this system must be equally good for everyone because it has produced “you,” the singular, individual self. In Coulombe’s hands, history is an alcoholic time-out. He simultaneously flattens rum consumers into a transhistorical consumer community while the chronological order in which he lists consuming subjects prevents a direct confrontation between contemporary consumers and the “planters and slaves” (Coulombe 262) who are their ancestors. This passage accomplishes linguistically what Coulombe’s book, which cuts off its account in 1945, disallows in content: a recognition of present material conditions that make, as Robbins indicates, “you” (the consumer) “yourself.” Anthony Maingot may inadvertently update this phenomenon when he concludes a discussion of twenty-first-century globalization in the rum industry, not with the promised outline of marketing solutions for Caribbean producers, but with advice to connoisseurs navigating the new rum marketplace (259–60). The shift to “discerning individuals” (260) prioritizes consumer identity over ethical and strategic questions about labor, production, and distribution.

The knowing obliviousness of consumers has long been associated with trading in the Caribbean. William Cowper, in his well-known poem “Pity for Poor Africans” (1788), expresses the equation concisely:

Cowper’s poem exposes a psychology of acquiescence in which communal worldview negates the relational aspect of consuming products made by enslaved people. Cowper makes visible the intuitive calculations that divorce everyday practice from systemic oppression, concretizing Arjun Appadurai’s principle that “in . . . small scale exchanges of things in ordinary life, this fact [politics] is not visible, for exchange has the routine and conventionalized look of all customary behavior” (57). The speaker, “shock’d” by the notion of human beings as commodities, cannot change his or her purchasing habits just because laborers are tortured. The imperative “must be mum” and communal norms of an English “we” notably fail to specify the authority to which the speaker reluctantly bows. Economic conditions cycle into cultural norms, producing a rhetorical question: “How could we do without . . . ?” Because “we” cannot. While this “we” has some connection to national security against the claims of “the French, Dutch, and Danes” (1.9), Cowper’s speaker is a corporate person, mouthing as personal the desires of shadowy institutional forces. The apparent powerlessness of individual consumers in the face of an overwhelming political-economic system is rather a contractual agreement to notice and deplore, perhaps, while continuing to enjoy and purchase.

Marx and Engels declared a commodity “a very queer thing” (31) because it negates the human component in production, and rum might be said to inherently embody that queerness in its double signification as a product (alcoholic beverage) and an attribute (strange, odd). Under the pressure of observation and analysis, rum evolves from a neutral object of exchange into a site of fraught, contested signification, capable of producing what Priti Ramamurthy calls a “dizzying relay” of information (737) that, in Bill Brown’s terms, “disclose[s]” information “about us” (5). Those who study alcohol consumption as a cultural phenomenon contend that “drink is one of the most noticeable, emotional and important ways in which people express and discuss their identities and cultures” (T. Wilson 7). Much is invested, psychologically and economically, in these cultural ways, and there is a strong disinclination to confront them as powerful constructions. The ability to express and discuss is accompanied by an equally strong impulse to silence and repress. Wilson’s statement is reversible: “Drink is one of the most noticeable, emotional and important ways in which” cultures express their people.

Foundations of Rum Poetics 3: Drunken Comportment in Literary Study

These questions are intimate and literal. As Mervyn Nicholson notes, “Food is not simply a thing or object. It is, properly, a mediating power” (2). Rum, like other ingestibles, confronts the self with the possibility that what one perceives as agency, physical autonomy, and even principled resistance may be an effect of external forces rather than internal motivation. Alcohols, as intoxicants, figure this dilemma as disinhibition, a loss of physical and social control. Yet the overcoding of alcohol has led, in literary study, to a speaking silence on the significance of drinking; there is plenty of work on addiction but much less attention to other possibilities. Marty Roth claims that in texts “there is a constant hum of alcoholic reference that should dominate all other indicators of meaning and yet can be apprehended only as cultural white noise” (xviii). In other words, the stigma of alcoholism and the risks of problem deflation tend to produce elliptical, euphemistic conversations about drinking habits in literary scholarship.

Authors with excessive drinking habits may be elevated to legend or sensitively protected to preserve their reputations for genius. Thomas Gilmore chronicles the “invisibility” of drinking in literary criticism because of social taboos and a desire to ignore its effect on a writer’s work (4–6). Even so, both he and Tom Dardis claim alcohol was ruinous to the production of great writers.41 For women writers as well, excessive drinking eventually destroys art: for example, Renate Günther chronicles “alcohol as an agent of female transgression” that becomes “an instrument of destruction” in the work of Marguerite Duras, and in Duras herself (201).42 These taboos and hesitations pervade classrooms as well. As Krista Ratcliffe describes, students and teachers may collude in “classroom denial” that reinforces the idea that alcoholism and addiction are not “appropriate” for discussion (107). Ratcliffe’s discussion, which centers on Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984), may also suggest that we invoke taboos more quickly when the characters in question are women and/or from stigmatized racial or ethnic groups.

Nancy Topping Bazin unintentionally captures this double standard in one of the only articles published that considers depictions of alcoholism in postcolonial novels. In her concluding paragraph, she states, “To fail to notice and analyze the impact of alcoholism on the characters in literature by third world writers is to fail to understand fully the exact nature of the pain they are describing. . . . their condemnation of economic, political, and social injustices should not blind us to how clearly many of them also reveal through their characters the destructive impact of alcoholism on human lives” (132). Within the article, Bazin clearly connects alcohol use to sexism and racism, but in her conclusion she separates “the destructive impact of alcoholism” from “economic, political, and social injustices.” Bazin, reasonably concerned about “problem deflation” as another troubling aspect of stereotyping cultures as pathological, focuses on symptom and diagnosis rather than the intersection of cultural codes in everyday objects. More important, Bazin’s reading calls for a check on interpretive lenses for distortions that encourage biases and silences around drunken comportment.

Roth’s rendering of alcohol’s signifying range as “white noise” is happily suggestive for this project because it points to the whiteness that makes a lot of the noise both in the texts and in the critical discourse around them. While Rum Histories moves toward what Edouard Glissant calls “cross-cultural poetics” that acknowledges “the irreducible density of the other” (Caribbean Discourse 133) through shared interactions with rum, many of the readings are accounts of white privilege confronting its ephemerality and, in two words, freaking out—physically and verbally. I have also charted this phenomenon when the privilege accorded a body is partially or incompletely anchored in a racial binary structured as North/South. Roth’s characterization of that “white noise” as a “hum” also unites the linguistic and the somatic, emphasizing the relationship between embodiment and agency at the inflection point of language. This practice builds on the ethical component of Brown’s thing theory, following Noland’s claims about the racialized body in Agency and Embodiment (2009). Responses “closer to the involuntary, autonomous body” may offer “access to an interiority that culture cannot entirely control”: “If the racialized subject must take part in the meaning-making systems of an alienating culture, at least this subject can struggle to reexperience what those systems physically require” (205). I seek to make visible in white subjects crises of embodiment that register the proximity of colonizing and colonized subjects as subjects: this strategy illuminates whiteness as a constructed advantage reliant on the persistence of colonial ideology despite the myth that postcoloniality releases white subjects from this ethical conundrum. As in Noland’s analysis of Fanon’s racialized body, these moments do not necessarily produce empathetic or progressive results, but they provide sites for rereading that may.43

But before that, we need to address another kind of white noise that obscures the role of rum in the analysis of postcoloniality: sugar.

Candy’s Dandy, but Liquor’s Quicker (Sugar . . . and Rum)

Although historians and literary critics have attended to the significance of sugar in literature and culture, rum has not merited similarly dense investigation. Sidney Mintz opened sugar to cultural studies in Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985), chronicling the factors that expanded the market and taste for sugar. Even so, he marvels at the fungibility of these explanations: “There is no way to avoid the term [power]—or one like it—when the objective is to clarify under what conditions the population of an entire country changes its behavior radically without the compulsion of open force and violence” (166). Four years later, Stuart Hall would provide the pithiest and prickliest dictum on the ethical dimensions of sugar: “I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea” (48). He claims to speak “symbolically” (48), but he also speaks literally, historically, of blood sugar: abolitionists reported that sugar and rum could contain body parts and fluids from enslaved laborers injured or killed during production. Hall extends the remark to the tea itself, reminding his listeners that the quintessential English image, the cuppa, is not native, but a bricolage of colonial commodities in which things and people are indistinguishable as tradable consumables.44

Studies of sugar as symbol and commodity explore the pressure points identified by Mintz and Hall: virtue/vice, agency/control, pure/polluted, whiteness/race. This study of rum invokes these binaries as well, drawing on and extending these studies by pushing their insights into the post-1945 eras of decolonization and postcolonialism to show that rum captures the intensification, or distillation, of colonization’s legacies even as historical ties to slavery attenuate. Many of the extant studies of sugar in literature focus on pre–twentieth century contexts. Two studies by Keith Sandiford and one by Timothy Morton choose their end points to coincide, roughly, with emancipation. Tobias Döring and Carl Plasa each compare colonial texts to contemporary responses by Anglophone Caribbean writers, charting resistance to the tropes developed to promote colonization and slavery in the Caribbean. Antonio Benítez-Rojo and Vera Kutzinski focus on Hispanophone Cuban literature and Cuban nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The turn to a Global South has prompted new work tracing the influence of sugar in twentieth-century art, including the novela de la caña, or sugarcane novel (Mahler “South-South Organizing”), memoir (Gernalzick), and multimedia art by Rita Indiana Hernández (Horn). This scholarship articulates examples of, or the potential to, cooperate across national and regional boundaries through shared experience of sugar’s multinational production. Mahler and Gernalzick excavate the cultural context for analyzing novels that address sugar, and Horn attends to semiotic operations as they reflect cultural conditions.

While rum poetics draws on these perspectives, it can describe slippage or switching points more thoroughly because intoxication unhinges dualities from their poles. For example, many scholars stress a dialectic of control and resistance, either within the text itself or, in the case of comparative studies, intertextually. Morton, for example, describes an “anxious play between sweetness and power” in which discourses of guilt and virtue collide at the intersection of sugar production and sugar’s figurative potential (175). In The Cultural Politics of Sugar (2000), Sandiford draws on the term negotium to argue that sugar—“natural object, prized commodity and metaphysical idea” (175)—allowed early white Creoles to accommodate a metropolitan audience, on which it relied for support and protection, to “the epistemologies of colonization and its particular productive underpinnings in sugar,” diffusing resistance to slavery as an economic base for a new civil society (16). In Sandiford’s later study, which contrasts obeah and sugar, he argues for “an Atlantic imaginary that is processual, multiracially informed, and fluid” (Theorizing 11); however, in practice, Sandiford locates sugar with “secular powers” and against obeah as part of slave resistance (52).

This dichotomy produces dissonances when rum appears because neither scholar can account for its material difference from sugar even as they recognize a difference. In Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary (2011), Sandiford analyzes the preservation of Three-Fingered Jack’s dismembered body in rum as a “collusive irony of immersion” that both subjects Jack to colonial power and enables memory of his heroism. In Sandiford’s account: “What is categorically established here is a convergence of flows generated from sugar, obeah and marronage. Three-Fingered Jack flees to the mountains. . . . There he is free to arm himself in the power of his fetish, obeah. He is later captured and returned to the secular power, sugar. His members are drenched in fluids of disparate meanings to each order, rum and blood” (52).

Sandiford contends a “flow” occurs because this scene signifies differently “to each order.” By “order,” Sandiford means audiences, one which supports slavery (order) and sees rum as signifying of “the master’s power,” or sugar, in Sandiford’s constellation (Theorizing 51), and one seeking inspiration for resistance and recognizing rum’s importance as part of blood oaths. But there is no actual sugar on the scene, and it is not sugar that enables the divergent audience interpretations. The flow is rum, and while Sandiford states the difference between sugar and rum—“as an alcoholic beverage” (51)—the analysis registers indifference to this distinction by assuming that sugar is rum and vice versa. Morton confronts this dilemma in an analysis of Robert Southey’s third sonnet on the slave trade, undermining as he enacts his argument about “the language of surplus” around sugar (6). After a three-page analysis of the phrase “the blood-sweeten’d beverage,” in which the beverage in question appears to be tea, Morton produces the following sentence: “It is as if the flow of blood, of rum and tea, all pooled in the same space, generating recoil and revulsion (and possibly, revolution)” (201–2). Is this fragment an editorial lapse (twice over), accidentally left over from a supplementary analysis of rum that Morton eliminated? This sentence implies that Morton has been talking about rum all along but has assumed he need not state that fact, yet it is not the sugar that produces the effects in this case.

Kutzinski, Döring, and Plasa take comparative approaches to resistance, juxtaposing works that forward colonizing efforts with those that resist. Kutzinski focuses on gender politics and developing national identity in Cuba, identifying the figure of the mulatta as a site at which discourses of sugar and national identity anxiously converge. The mulatta, Kutzinski argues, is consistently imaged as a form of sugar, whether to reinforce colonial power or to support “the paternalist political fiction of a national multiculture” (13). Kutzinski’s analysis of sexist sugar imagery recognizes that some modern depictions of the mulatta’s sexuality as “sugar” do not advance far from the endemic sexual violence central to enslavement; instead, these representations grant women the freedom to be sexually available to all men (instead of to only white men) rather than equal citizenship (37). In the Anglophone context, Plasa and Döring each consider “the ways in which black writing of sugar revises the white archive out of which it grows” (Plasa 3), and Plasa echoes Kutzinski’s concern that in this literature “the black woman [is marginalized] in favor of a focus on the predicament of her male counterpart” (97).

Both Plasa and Döring, like Morton, invent a poetics; these capture linguistic effects used to shape audience (or audiences’s) response. Döring uses the phrase “sugar-cane poetics” to name an aesthetic that attempts to “domesticate” the Caribbean landscape using Georgic forms, signifying exotic landscapes and exploitative labor practices into submission (55). Like both Sheller and Sandiford, Döring is interested in the transportation of these effects to audiences in “discontinuous spaces, located on different continents, linked only by maritime transfers” (52). Plasa introduces the terms “Muscovado poetics” (8) and “muscovado textuality,” which he intends will capture a “tension between refinement and residue” (72), a concept that resonates with Sandiford’s negotium but takes a dimmer view of colonial-era texts that sugarcoat slavery. Plasa notes the distinct semiotic potential of rum in texts about sugar, calling attention to the use of ruminate in Andrew Burn’s 1792 abolitionist text (47), but his analysis is inconsistent. In a discussion of masculinity in Austin Clarke’s 2002 novel The Polished Hoe, Plasa fails to distinguish rum as a source of masculine identification (rum-shop culture) and its role in authorizing sexual assault against women in the cane fields (161), foreclosing an intersectional critique of rum. Likewise, Benítez-Rojo lauds poet Nicolás Guillén for depicting a “neo-African beauty” (340) whose sexuality has a “revolutionary quality” (341), but he overlooks—as Kutzinski does not—the depiction of women as consumable in “one gulp, / like a glass of rum” (Guillén, qtd. in Benítez-Rojo, “Nicolás Guillén” 343). Kutzinski’s insights into the gendering of sugar pave a path toward similar potentials in rum, which, as an alcoholic beverage, is highly coded through gender.

More recent scholarship on sugar, and sugar and literature, relies on the modernization of the sugar industry to examine new forms of international political efficacy, and in this context limited references to rum are associated with past industrial formations. Popular manifestations of this phenomena are Brian McKenna’s 2005 documentary Big Sugar and a 2013 National Geographic article “Sugar Love,” by Rich Cohen. Both of these works connect the origins of the sugar industry in slavery to modern conditions. For McKenna, the exploitation of Haitian cane-cutters on American-owned plantations in the Dominican Republic is enslavement; Cohen attributes obesity rates among African Americans in Clarkson, Mississippi, in part to economic inequities rooted in enslavement. Historical conditions for sugar production have changed, but the effects on health and life options for Black and brown people remain devastating and relevant. The exploitative nature of sugar production has not been superseded through historical changes in conditions of production and consumption. New scholarship shares this view. In claiming cane sugar as “a material index . . . of the descriptive and critical potential of the concept of the Global South,” Nadja Gernalzick considers how “the complex phenomenology of the global sugar economy” can anchor potentially transformative alliances among people working in the industry across regions, national borders, and oceans (108–9). Maja Horn narrates the history of sugar production in Hispaniola to articulate how Rita Indiana Hernández’s Sugar/Azúcal project resists commitments to “postcolonial futures . . . formulated without these regions and peoples in mind” (272). Like both Horn and Gernalzick, Anne Garland Mahler examines “the possibilities and limits of a transnational, translinguistic, and transracial political community” (“South-South Organizing” 9); her example is the sugarcane novel, a subgenre of the novel of the land (novela de la tierra) specific to twentieth-century interwar Latin America. Mahler, examining a literary form that is simultaneously modern and historical, concludes that the genre identifies the forces that prevented, at that political moment, “a pan-Caribbean political collectivity” (20). In each case, the efficacy of sugar as a category of analysis depends on modernized conditions of production or the continued relevance of sugar as a global commodity.

Rum, when it is mentioned in discussions of sugar, remains a cipher for a superseded colonial past. Most frequently, rum is replaced by drugs as a dangerous foreign product, but rum can produce this opposition in other ways as well.45 Neither Horn nor Gernalzick mention rum, but Mahler briefly explains that for a middle-class protagonist, drinking rum leads to alcoholism, which she reads as a figure for “a choice to turn away from political consciousness” rather than consolidate his identification with the workers. This reading seems logical, but from the perspective of rum poetics, the leap from rum to alcoholism plus regressive politics requires further analysis. Mahler seems to recognize this possibility in that she both quotes the novel’s English translation (“everything is rum”) and then repeats the phrase in her own prose, but she does not explicate further because the original Spanish ron does not carry the connotations of rum (“South-South Organizing” 19). One might argue, however, that the linguistic inflexibility of ron makes a statement like “todo es ron” even more interesting in the context of an analysis of Communist organizing (23n96). This repetition without explication is a shorthand, a reference so economical as to be obscure and obvious at the same time. This strategy joins the elision/substitution practice noted among earlier scholars of sugar as a phenomenon in literary-critical writing about rum, an issue I address specifically in the penultimate chapter of this study.

Rum is often rum when it appears in literature and other discourses engaging the Caribbean. As a method for unpacking this strangeness, rum poetics hews closer to Plasa’s muscovado textuality and Morton’s poetics of spice than to Döring’s sugarcane poetics in that it concerns, as Morton states, “the political . . . within the minutest particulars of the poetic” (7), but it retains an emphasis on the circulation of texts that both Döring and Sandiford trace. Thus, rum poetics retains priorities identified by scholars of sugar, but it also recognizes that rum retains cultural associations with vice, libations, pollution, and the Caribbean that, for sugar, have either been lost or transmuted. “I was on a sugar high” registers differently, in terms of both shame and exculpation, than “I was drunk.” People do not travel to the Caribbean expecting to eat sugar as part of regional culture. In dominant Western discourse, negative views of sugar concern obesity and diet, which does not obviate geographically specific scholarship on sugar any more than the existence of multinational alcohol conglomerates obviates rum’s status as a Caribbean symbol. Rum poetics pursues, at the textual rather than the generic level, David Scott’s recognition that “the colonial past may never let go” (220) and, in fact, may bind its subjects more tightly just as they announce their freedom from its demands. On the other hand, rum poetics identifies opportunities, mostly missed, for reparation and relationality. While these questions about subjectivity, agency, and embodiment echo abolitionists’ attempts to promote ethical consumption, this approach articulates how rum circulates semiotically in new sociopolitical conditions emerging as European empires recede.

Rum Poetics: Economical Readings

Rum has a set of standard associations, many of which feed into a generalized, popular Caribbean imaginary and inhibit critical investigations of rum. To conclude, then, I want to consider how this popular imaginary appears and to suggest its resonance in critical discourse. Baz Dreisinger’s essay “On a Tropical Rum Trail” appeared in the New York Times travel section in 2014, topped by a nearly 11 x 11 photo that fronts the print version of the article (fig. 2).

Pictured is a young Black woman relaxing in a hammock, glass in hand, solitary against a backdrop of crystal-blue water. The caption reads, “At Jake’s hotel in Treasure Beach, Jamaica, a worker relaxes” (Dresinger). This photograph draws on two visual traditions of depicting the Caribbean: first, those of planters reclining while enslaved workers labor and serve (see fig. 1) and, second, images of plantations and beaches from which photographers and artists erase labor (Strachan 84–85; Kutzinski 52). It also eliminates the presence of rum, the subject of Dreisinger’s story. The visual rhetoric endows “a worker” with the pleasures of plantation slavery and Caribbean tourism. Her employment conditions are so comfortably paced and placed that her work is the vacation this travel piece promotes. Juxtaposed with the story’s subtitle—“Touring three Caribbean islands, sip by sip, and taking in tales of blood, sweat, and sugarcane”—the article visually and textually renders rum’s history a “tale” to be heard (“taking in”) but not owned (“taking on”), a mode of consumption that Ian Baucom describes as “a melancholy but cosmopolitan romanticism” that allows viewers to “move on” after passively witnessing the scene (Specters 296). Capping this effect is the beer the worker drinks. This image, the centerpiece of an article on rum, does not venture to show a worker enjoying the fruits of her labor, erasing the accumulation of history that might link sophisticated rum-tasting tourists, tourist industry workers, and enslaved people. An artful reversal of images of pristine beaches occupied by a solitary sunbather, this image implies that when she is there, the tourist is not, and when the tourist is there, she is not.

This kind of disappearing act translates into images of rum in literary texts that mark erased, declined, or untraced connections. Critics, as seen above in the sugar literature, also decline to see what rum can disclose even when they mention it. In Specters of the Atlantic (2005), Baucom traces “a financializing, decorporealizing logic of equivalence” that he first identifies in a naval minute book detailing financial compensation given to “workmen of the empire” for lost body parts (6). He contrasts this accounting habit to the absence of similar compensation to enslaved people, bought and sold in a separate financial register. This contrast opens his study of the “specter of slavery” (7) and founds a revision of historical periodization. To demonstrate his point, Baucom balances the minute book against the logbook of the slave ship Ranger and provides the following summary of the evidence:

For the crew, if we can reconstruct a portrait of their lives from these scant details, five months of boredom . . . one hundred fifty days of restlessness broken up by the intermittent raid on the ship’s rum supply, the stray talk of mutiny, the intimidating of the human cargo mounting up below the decks. For the captain the greater stress of finding work to keep his men occupied, diverting them from rebellion, holding the crew in line and his ship in place as he builds his cargo with frustrating slowness, one or two slaves at a time, and works the calculus of profit and risk; too long at the coast and the talk of mutiny may convert itself into a real rebellion. . . . For the slaves? . . . For them, nothing unusual, nothing to make their terror, their captivity, their sorrow particularly interesting, memorable, worth writing about. Nothing momentous. Just the typical. (14)

While Baucom professes outrage, he is not surprised. But consider how the tone moves from dismissiveness for the crew to empathy for the captain to outrage for enslaved men, women, and children. “Restlessness” and “boredom” among the crew, Baucom implies, is stressful, but not as stressful as for the overworked captain. The crew’s actions Baucom assumes are largely aimless, as rebelliousness is only “stray talk” rather than legitimate complaint. By contrast, this summary attributes organized competence to the administrative leader. The logbook, however, tells a slightly different story. What Baucom translates as “intermittent raids on the ship’s rum supply” is labelled “embezzling” in the ship’s log (12)—a financial crime directed at corporate assets vital to the financialization on which Baucom bases his argument. It is possible to use rum to push the interpretation of the log toward one that credits the crew with greater strategic knowledge about their role in the slave trade than Baucom allows. I hope I can make this point without overestimating the probability that the crew actively frustrates trade in solidarity with the enslaved, or by denying the crimes—far beyond “intimidating”—crews and captains commonly committed against their so-called cargo. The attacks on rum, used to trade for slaves, may not be entirely hedonistic. In this reading, Baucom relies on rum to economize.

On Overreading

My disagreement with Baucom’s reading here does not keep me from agreeing with other parts of his argument, and it might seem petty to call him out for an incident that covers four pages of a roughly four-hundred-page monograph. Yet it is precisely a transhistorical generalization about the morals of working-class alcohol use that allows rum to countersign stereotype, an interpretive practice that reinforces the murky divisions between some kinds of waged labor and enslaved labor as well as pitting lower-class white men and captured Africans against each other necessarily and completely—and with a minimum of semiotic effort.

This study grew in the shadows of the transformative theorizations of modernity and modernism enabled by the advance of postcolonial theory. However, to zoom in, as Susan Stanford Friedman recommends at the end of Planetary Modernisms (2015, 312), Rum Histories offers an angle of vision rather than a corrective lens. It is not my purpose to berate scholars who do not share my specific interest in rum, but this study interests itself in the dissemination of rum (and rum) in the texture of discourse and everyday life; I therefore dwell in some unlikely places, pulling normative discursive emphases askew. As readings toggle between the significance and insignificance of rum, often looking both ways at once, I replace economical shorthand with lavish spending that, given the paucity of prior information, may appear excessive—overreading, in fact. Following David Kazanjian, I suggest that charges of overreading can be a disingenuous form of institutional gatekeeping and propose instead to characterize the project of rum poetics as “speculative” (80). Delving into short scenes in larger works, yoking brief references to broader contexts, and examining scholarship as part of a network of signifying practices flatten hierarchies that insulate literary scholarship from its objects to illuminate a literal and metaphorical economy of reading rum. What does it mean to pull rum to the center and insist on its gravity? What can this practice reveal about the workings of texts that need rum to operate seamlessly as part of the scenery? What work is required to be accountable to and for rum’s presence, to recognize consistently the histories that bring rum to be present, and to imagine how it might augur “post-” colonial futures?

Rum Histories: Where They Go

Thus far I have laid out the major historical, cultural, and economic structures that feed into the contemporary signification range of rum in literature, positing that these inflows make rum an economical image for capturing, condensing, and disseminating the anxieties of living with the systemic legacies of colonialism as a “post-” colonial subject in relation to other “post-” colonial subjects. Chapter 1 retraces some of this ground, but with a shift in the balance from context to textual representation. I describe the signification of rum in a panoply of texts, from canonical literature to historical surveys. The connections rum forges between novels set in Western Canada, Hawaii, upstate New England, Jamaica, and Dominica, as well as between literary texts and historical or secondary texts, demonstrate the semiotic currents rum carries across literary territories—some far removed from sites of production—and illuminating the consumption of Caribbean stereotypes even when the Caribbean is not a main subject or setting.

Chapters 2–5 divide along several axes to examine the interplay between individualized and systemic explanations for alcohol use as a form of investment in legacies of colonialism. Chapters 2 and 3 lean toward personal and interpersonal relationships and the potential for reparative readings of “the other,” and readings focus heavily on gendered alcohol use in an intersectional context. These chapters continue to develop hitherto unrealized connections between texts scholars would define as products of the Caribbean or the Caribbean diaspora and texts defined as American (chapter 2) or British (chapter 3) because these cultures, as I have indicated earlier, largely share gendered norms for alcohol use. This similarity provides a useful point of departure from which to explore intersectional ramifications for relational and reparative thinking. Chapter 2, featuring V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street and Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary (written 1959, published 1998), articulates masculine ambition in the context of drinking as homosocial bonding, creating a tension between drinking as communality and the desire for cosmopolitan exceptionalism. Chapter 3 examines historical novels by Sylvia Townsend Warner (The Flint Anchor) and Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea) to chart an alternative semiotic economy of alcohol exchange among servants, women, and enslaved people that, in showing how the past could be different, recuperates a narrative space in which to envision a different future. These two chapters focus on texts produced during the height of decolonization, when the idea of being postcolonial had dates attached to it—one day there is a colony, the next a nation-state—and this official separation of the colonial past from the postcolonial present usefully illustrates the anxieties produced when real-time experience does not match official histories. The latter parts of these two chapters track the evolution of these paradoxes in more contemporary work, where tropes associated with rum migrate and intensify as they are redeployed to engage globalization and potentially resistant forms aligned with a Global South.

From regional and international comparisons, chapters 4 and 5 turn to focus exclusively on works produced by authors from the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. I propose the figure of libations as a site where joint political purpose could lubricate movements toward a postcolonial world, but this potential is retarded by pathological readings of rum drinking. In chapter 4, novels about political action describe the process by which political activity is reframed as drunken chaos, either missing or rejecting joint recognition of the imprint of colonial legacies on present international, intercultural, or interpersonal relationships. Chapter 5 revisits this constellation metacritically, as a problem of reading in literary studies. By reengaging the phenomenon I trace in scholarship about sugar, I analyze the ways literary critics invoke rum as a critical aporia, present but unaccounted for, even when the text appears to call for rum as a site for critique. The undigested presence of rum in these critical arguments highlights what I have called an economical, rather than a critical, use of rum.

Despite the Caribbean settings of these novels, however, the authors in chapters 4 and 5 represent the reach of Caribbean representation in the Anglo-Atlantic. Only Earl Lovelace and Diana McCauley among these authors consistently reside in the Caribbean—a statement that has no bearing on their literary scope in any case. Michelle Cliff and Paule Marshall both lived in the United States, and their work is as likely—perhaps more likely—to appear in American literature courses as it is on Caribbean literature syllabi. George Lamming, like Naipaul, represents a literary field that becomes Black British writing. Sylvia Wynter’s only novel, The Hills of Hebron, is set in Jamaica, but she was born in Cuba, spent significant time in England before obtaining an academic post in Jamaica and is arguably better known now as a philosopher and theorist based in California. As in prior chapters, the concluding section addresses a more contemporary text in which obscuring politics in a haze of rum reveals the difficulties of forging an inclusive “postcolonial” relationality as a result.

In the concluding chapter, I turn to the reification of rum poetics in mass media, balancing an examination of 2016 Trump/rum memes featuring Captain Jack Sparrow with an analysis of the film Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl and its catchphrase “Why is the rum gone?” I return to the notion that rum poetics can trace intensifications and condensations in the paradoxes of postcoloniality as the past transmutes into a future that does not yet look different enough, despite the siren calls of imperial nostalgia.

Rum captures conditions of postcolonial subjectivity because it models the structuring of agency by forces that are external and prior (histories of economic and political arrangements) and internal and current (incorporated as values and customs that appear coextensive with identity). Perhaps you are what you drink (or not). How external conditions are internalized as norms and expectations may be a mystery of digestion, but it is a disturbing realization, as it suggests we may act on desires we perceive as, but that are not, in fact, our own. When rum is rum, it may dissolve logic and crystallize reason, speak truth and lie to power, coerce and forge unions, encourage and quell resistance. The results of the postcolonial “hangover” are not entirely predictable. New readings may establish tenuous points of coalition among divided subjects, states, and cultures. These coalitions rely on telling rum (hi)stories together rather than apart, allowing the strange and surprising, the danger and the difficulty, to be a risk worth taking.