MDDM related book: rice & slaves

[Doug Millison]

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=284791018035194

Judith A. Carney. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in
the Americas. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv +
240 pp. Notes, references, index. $37.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-00452-3.

[...] Judith Carney carries the investigation one step further than her
predecessors by asserting that rice and slaves were not separate realities
but one unique entity. Rice in the Americas was grown thanks to the slaves'
expertise in rice cultivation acquired in West Africa. The role of white
planters, and so-called "innovators," is hardly mentioned, except briefly
at the end of the book (p. 162). Rice becomes "black," partly as a response
to Peter Wood and Alex West's "white rice," and partly to suggest the near
total agricultural assimilation between the crop and the slaves. In Black
Rice, the dichotomy between the color of slave labor and the color of rice
disappears. Rice becomes a metonymy for slaves, and vice versa.

Judith Carney's argument is founded upon the implicit assertion that the
value of rice did not derive from the masters' technological
investments--namely from capital--but from the slaves and their labor. In
many ways, Black Rice is a story of re-appropriation, or re-possession (p.
156), a shift in ownership.

As Judith Carney constantly reminds us, the history of rice in the Americas
is a complex, and often, vexing question. Part of the reason is its
location at the crossroads of several disciplines: agricultural history,
anthropology and botany, but also African American cultural studies and
biotechnology. The history of rice does not limit itself to botanical
genealogy: when and where the first seeds were introduced, how they were
exported from the Eastern to the Western Hemispheres in the period of "The
Columbian Exchange," how rice was planted and grown in the various
micro-environments of the New World, and how it became, eventually, the
backbone of the South Carolina economy.[3] It is neither the nostalgic nor
prejudiced narrative of rice planters' descendants who, in the post slavery
period, glorified the ingenuity of their forebears into turning seemingly
inhospitable wetlands into some of the most productive rice fields of the
Atlantic world (pp. 79-80).

In Black Rice, Judith Carney argues that rice grew in the Western
Hemisphere because slaves--the physical continuity of rice--and women in
particular, selected the seeds, prepared the land, constructed the canals
and trunks necessary for irrigation, planted and tended the fields despite
the harsh climatic conditions, harvested and processed rice, whether Oryza
Glaberrima, the African variety of domesticated rice, or Oryza Sativa, its
Asian counterpart. Judith Carney asserts that the history of rice
cultivation in the Americas is the story of a transfer of knowledge and of
African agency; "rice cultivation in the Americas depended upon the
diffusion of an entire cultural system, from production to consumption" (p.
165). In Black Rice, agriculture, culture and technology interplay in one
of the most paramount stories of African cultural survivals and retentions,
most visible in the provision gardens of the slaves and in the food
preferences of the runaway slave communities of South America (pp. 115-116,
155-159).

Black Rice takes the reader deep into the Rice region of West Africa, to
the primary center of rice domestication, from rain-fed to wetland and
tidal ecosystems, along the Niger and Gambia rivers, westward through the
mangrove rice fields of Guinea Bissau, over the Atlantic to tidewater South
Carolina, and southward to Surinam, Cayenne and Brazil. It ends its course
where it started, where it all started, before slaves were bought into
slavery and sold in the Americas. African women, then, woke up milling rice
with the mortar and pestle; a fragile ecological equilibrium had been
established in the three areas of rice cultivation; and a complex system of
irrigated rice cultivation had been perfected long before the arrival of
the first Portuguese ships off the Coast of West Africa.

The book progresses in a chrono-thematic and circular way. It starts with
the first Portuguese voyages to Africa in the fourteenth century. Early
European travelers described the abundance of rice along the West African
coast and the existence of intricate techniques of rice cultivation among
the different African communities they encountered, in particular among the
Baga strongly associated with mangrove rice production. The three
ecosystems characteristic of rice cultivation in Africa were the tidal
floodplain environment, inland swamps and rain-fed uplands. Rice was
typically planted along a landscape gradient that included all three
eco-systems. From the outset, the social organization of rice culture was
founded upon women. The gendered division of rice labor varied from one
region to the other, but processing and cooking remained everywhere tasks
reserved for women. Milling, winnowing and parboiling, for example, were
typical tasks performed by women. The first encounters between Europeans
and African rice growers ended in bitter irony. At a time when rice became
one of the most profitable export crops in America, rice cultivation in
Africa was disrupted and disorganized by the depletion of its labor force.
>From that point onwards, all notions of African rice expertise were denied.
[...]

Slaves would have been familiar with the different micro-systems they
encountered in South Carolina. Owing to their knowledge of mangrove rice,
slaves played a pivotal role in the shift from swamp cultivation to
floodplain, irrigated rice. Only slaves, women in particular, knew how to
mill rice before the advent of mechanization. Yet, in another example of
bitter, historical irony, rice, which was originally a means of resistance
and negotiation in the "charter period of slavery," was turned into a
symbol of oppression.[4] White, "innovative" planters gradually
appropriated rice. [..]