Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte (20-21 February)

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Speaker to be confirmed
• Thursday 20 February 2020, 09:00-17:00
• Sainsbury Laboratory Auditorium (Cambridge University Botanic Garden), 20th February and The Batmen Auditorium (Gonville and Caius), 21st February.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Speaker to be confirmed.

The pineapple is an emblem of power, promise and politics and continues to attract interest from plant scientists, historians, and artists. Its ‘discovery’ by European colonisers in the late fifteenth century and its trajectory around the world, from an object of luxury and horticultural innovation in the early modern period to an everyday food in a can and a logo of fair-trade movements today, is a story through which we can understand modern globalisation.

This interdisciplinary conference brings together academics from the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences as well as museum professionals and artist-practitioners to investigate the understudied tensions between the representational power of the pineapple and the political contexts of its production around the globe, thereby making connections between the global and local which are at the heart of contemporary debates about the nature and origins of the food that we eat.

Food will be at the centre of an ambitious ground-breaking exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, ‘Feast & Fast: The art of food in Europe, 1500-1800’ (26 November 2019 to 19 April 2020). The exhibition, curated by Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu, will explore some of these contemporary concerns, such as global food security, sustainability, seasonality, food supply chains, and climate change, through the imaginative display and critical interpretation of objects, images and texts from the early modern period, linking the past with our present.

This conference will build on some of the exhibition themes but expand them beyond its early modern and Eurocentric framework, by engaging with new historical writing on global history, which emphasizes the connected histories of commodities which do not always place Europe at its centre. The easy propagation of the pineapple, and its cultivation across the globe, from Brazil to Africa, China, and Europe, is particularly conducive to this kind of approach. It will also build on new approaches in the history of material culture, in particular, on the agency of matter and on making and knowing. The conference will also draw on the horticultural and botanical expertise at the University of Cambridge, with the visit to the glasshouses at the Botanic Garden and the study of specimens at the Herbarium, and incorporate this into our discussions

This talk is part of the CRASSH series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• CRASSH
• ESRC DTP
• Sainsbury Laboratory Auditorium (Cambridge University Botanic Garden), 20th February and The Batmen Auditorium (Gonville and Caius), 21st February

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.