Cooking in Modernity's Crucible: Global Locals, Native Creoles, and the Politics of Mixture in the Caribbean

摘要

The Caribbean, in what has now become an article of faith for many scholars, is the "crucible of modernity," a basin that signals the double meaning of crucible as both a pot for melting materials and a situation of severe test or trial. Candice Goucher delves into the history of Caribbean food to trace the shape of this "crucible," a pot that contained the "earliest morsels of our globalized experience" (p.xvi). This crucible brought four continents together on proto-industrial plantations, inaugurating an experience of linguistic, culinary, and cultural cross-pollination that has come to be called creoliza-tion. Goucher embraces this paradigm of creolization, delineating what she calls "a Creole continuum of foodways" as a framework for understanding culinary history in the Caribbean and the origins of modern globalization (pp.xv-xx). As there is much food for thought in this excellent buffet-style survey of Caribbean culinary history, I focus more narrowly on Goucher's creolization framework and the limits of this interpretive model for the processes of globalization, cultural amalgamation, and culinary mixture that creolization has consistently epitomized.