- I'm in the Department of Politics,
Policy and International Relations.
We have our first panel of what we hope
will be a very successful series
of faculty scholars discussion this academic year.
We hope to have four such events,
so two in the fall, two in the spring.
And these events are here to highlight
the incredible research and scholarship
done by our wonderful colleagues.
And we're very excited to have
two really incredible researchers here,
joining us to talk about the research,
the books that they have been working on in this past year.
So our first speaker is Kimberly Poitevin
and she received the Research APR in 2020
to work on her book entitled,
"Women, Cosmetics, and Origins of White Supremacy."
And the book explores the ways that women's use of cosmetics
in early modern England made whiteness visible
and racial identity and contributed to the development
of white supremacy as we recognize it today.
In today's talk, she will provide a few examples
of ways that English women used whiteness
as an instrument of power in relation to men,
to each other and other racialized groups.
And our second speaker is professor Keja Valens
from the English Department.
She also received the Research APR in 2021
to work on her book project,
"Caribbean Cookbooks: Culinary Colonialism,
and Recipes for Independence."
Her book examines, how Caribbean cookbooks transmit
and play out the tensions between colonial dependents
and de-colonial national projects,
as they locate Caribbean culture and its concoction
in domestic spaces that are gendered female
and that negotiated race, language and class
in particularly domestic ways.
In today's presentation, she will focus on the construction
and ordering of colonial communities
in Caroline's Sullivan's 1893 Jamaican cookery book.
So thank you very much for joining us.
We're so excited you're here and that you have agreed
to share your wonderful scholarship with us.
And maybe Kimberly if you wanna start, that'd be great.
- There are leaf blowers outside my apartment right now.
(laughing)
(leaf blowers humming)
I wonder if maybe it makes sense for Keja to go first.
- Yeah, I was just gonna propose that.
- Is that okay?
- Yeah, I was just gonna propose that. That sounds great.
- Yeah, sounds good.
Can you let me share my screen?
I have some images.
And I'll just start.
Having it, you know, just thank you so much to CRCA
for these research grants.
It's really impossible to get any research done
during a semester with a four load.
And this is the only way and a really fantastic way
to feel supported and get stuff done.
So thank you.
- I think you should be able, you're listed as a co-host,
I think you should be able to show,
- Yes, now I can, perfect, thank you.
So I have, let me turn this into a slide show.
There we go.
So I have some images that will go along,
I'm just gonna say, the pictures are not from the cookbook,
but they're just to make it a little more interesting.
So Caroline Sullivan's 1893,
"Jamaica Cookery Book"
is the first cookbook written by a Caribbean woman.
The first Jamaican cookbook and the first cookbook
from anywhere in the British West Indies.
Very little is known about Caroline Sullivan.
And in fact, the first edition was only signed C.S.
But the second edition,
which was in 1897,
had her full name on it.
It appears that she was a white Creole woman,
connected to Jamaica's British and plantation elite,
and that she maintains significant wealth
and position through the end of her life.
A close reading of "Jamaica Cookery Book's"
type and manner of instruction.
The ways that Sullivan asserts her own authority
and imparts it to readers, uncover Sullivan's position
in an on Jamaica, revealing how she both represented
and guided a community of white women in Jamaica,
in relation to the natives and their cuisine.
Sullivan identifies herself, not as the composer,
but the collector of the recipes
in the "Jamaica Cookery Book."
She joins a long line of colonial collectors
who expropriate and appropriate Afro indigenous material,
labor and knowledge and then use it,
as in "The Traffic in Women" that Gayle Rubin describes
"to solidify relations among those in power
"at the expense of the objects of exchange".
As not only an intermediary between the people
and her readers, but as the owner of our
"ordinary Jamaica cooking", as she calls it,
Sullivan is a facilitator of exchange
who as she takes possession of the people
and their culinary history
also acknowledges their contributions.
As Sullivan addresses and forms community with her audience
and positions the sources of her recipes,
the "Jamaica Cookery Book" participates in both colonialism
and proto-independence work.
Colonial hetero-patriarchy and proto-feminism,
white elitist racism and Creolization
in the (speaks in foreign language) of hybridity
and cultural pluralism.
Sullivan names, as her primary audience,
recent arrivals to Jamaica.
And she writes, quote,
"I venture to hope that those various methods of cooking
"here given, maybe have some little use to newcomers
"on whose behalf this work has been undertaken."
At the same time, she also addresses, quote,
"Those whose long residence in the island
renders them familiar with all the details
of our ordinary Jamaican cooking," end quote.
Sullivan positions herself and her audience
as sharing a familiarity with English cookbooks
and with cooking in general,
as she explains that she does not include recipes
for British staples because, quote,
"My desire is merely to introduce newcomers to Jamaica,
"our own native methods of cooking, our own products,
"and by no means to attempt to cope
"with the many excellent works that at present exists
"on English and other cookery".
Sullivan recognizes that her English leadership
arrives in Jamaica,
not only as strangers to our native dishes,
but also with certain prejudices
against salt fish and goat mutton, for example.
As she addresses the unfamiliarity and prejudice,
Sullivan outlines a uniquely Jamaican cuisine,
delicately poised between independent identity
and service to the empire.
Sullivan affirms a superiority of things English
as she affirms that some discomfort
on the part of the newcomer is reasonable for, quote,
"Sometimes one is disappointed," end quote,
notably by the way the meat is butchered and sold.
She assures that goat mutton can be thoroughly enjoyed,
but she also concludes her recipes for it with, quote
"All my endeavor is to make the best of an inferior thing,
when one cannot get the best," end quote.
This is in her introduction to this recipe.
A few things, in other words,
the English reader will rightly conclude
are the best in England.
These are balanced, however, by others from Jamaica
that are almost better or more nourishing,
even some worthy of being,
"Put in a parcel and sent to England",
and far outweighed by delicious Jamaican delicacies
Sullivan introduces to her English audiences.
The prejudices Sullivan ultimately shows are misguided
and can be cured by an actual encounter
with Jamaican cuisine.
Quote, "I have heard people say over and over again,
"that no matter how disguised goat mutton may be,
"they would never eat it.
"Yet those very people have enjoyed it in my presence
"so much so in fact, as to ask for another helping."
Proper information and encounter with Jamaican cuisine
served with the skills of Sullivan's cooking, or her cooks,
can remediate English ignorance.
By offering English women her insights into Jamaican food,
Sullivan not only positions herself and her book
as the bridge between English and native cultures,
raising all of the questions of alliance, translation
and treachery that bridges beg.
But she also asserts it as a space of community
distinct from both the English and the native.
And this is getting into the question of what the Creole is
that I'm not gonna get into very much.
Nearly every recipe in the "Jamaica Cookery Book"
centers on a Jamaican ingredient or technique
that is not common in England.
Nearly all the recipes also use English ingredients,
such as the recipe for cornmeal duckoonoo,
that calls for butter and milk
along with corn and plantain.
Sullivan's selection of dishes and the recipes themselves
demonstrate the long and complex history
of culinary crossings that render
West Indian cuisine distinct,
and that lead many to refer to it as Creole.
Sullivan's recipe for ochro soup, for example,
calls for ingredients from Africa, ochro,
Europe, salt beef, thyme and salt pork,
and indigenous Caribbean,
Indian kale or callilu, tomato and scallion.
With salt, beef and pork bearing also the history
of their providence in slave diets.
"Proudly exhibiting our own native methods
"of cooking our own products," end quote.
Sullivan uses the possessive our to designate
not only that which we belong to, but that which we possess.
The advertisement for the "Jamaica Cookery Book"
in "The Daily Gleaner", this is the major Jamaica paper,
on Tuesday, February 12th and Tuesday, March 26th
and Wednesday, March 27th, 1895,
highlight the possessive function of "our",
with the words "our cook" under the image conveying
both that the recipes are collected from this cook
or others like her,
and that this cook belongs to C.S.,
a possession in which her readers share or can join.
Although many of Sullivan's recipes use the imperative
that instructs the reader directly,
elite and even middle-class women in Jamaica
did not generally perform the cooking in their own homes.
Sullivan mentions the direct management of domestics
only once to, quote,
"Confess that, if one has to depend on a cook,
"who is no real cook at all,
"and can only roast and boil as she thinks,
"which is again another matter,
"one may find a tough stringy inedible mass
"served up with a quantity of grease and water as gravy,
"enough to make patar familias enraged
"and housekeeper in no enviable frame of mind," end quote.
The "Jamaica Cookery Book" then can save one
from being in a position to depend on a cook,
especially one who is no real cook.
One, (audio muted)
executes one's instructions.
The "Jamaica Cookery Book" informs readers how to enjoy,
ask for and direct the preparation of the foods
those cooks make.
While Sullivan's cookbook articulates a class system
where the Europeans order and the natives execute,
it also betrays the culinary expertise,
not only of the cooks who are employed
by the likes of Sullivan,
but also the culinary and economic acumen and practices
of the people who offer pre-made products for sale
and the tastes of the people whose preferences she mentions.
While the reason Sullivan gives
for recommending that readers buy
(speaking foreign language)
bammies and hominy for cake pudding, biscuits or pap,
as in this recipe,
is that they are tiring and tedious to make.
Her brief reference to each process
shows them to require not only time and energy,
but also technical skill.
As she reports that the natives sell roasted pindas,
to make a cake with them,
Sullivan also mentions not only cashews,
but a bean called (speaks foreign language)
showing the culinary and market savvy of the natives
that serves not only English and elite Jamaica buyers,
but also their own communities.
Introducing the set's non salt fish,
Sullivan asserts that some native preparations
improve on the European.
Quote, "It is not surprising to most newcomers
"to find that in Jamaica,
"there is hardly a more popular dish among the natives,
"and often among the upper classes,
"than the despised salt fish,
"eaten at home, not from choice,
"but as a sort of penitential dish.
"Here, it is the almost daily,
"and certainly the favorite food of the people generally,
"and cooked as they cook it,
"it cannot fail to please the most fastidious," end quote.
This passage exemplifies her distinction between the natives
and the upper classes who can be United
in being pleased by the same dishes when cooked properly,
but remain safely separated by the frequency
and degrees of favor with which those dishes are enjoyed.
The separation is important for the people.
So mutton with Guinea hen weed in vinegar,
which they fondly hope destroys the detestable taste
of the weed, to so little avail
that Sullivan instructs her readers in another recipe
to avoid this altogether.
Similarly, there are several other recipes that she says
are just an inedible.
And in the recipe for boiled pumpkins, Sullivan indicates
that the natives use this Creole culinary term
"junks", set apart in quotations,
and do not use salt and butter,
and perhaps most importantly,
do not prepare the cooked food for presentation
shaping in a dish, as a mark of their lack of refinement.
Sullivan's descriptions of the natives techniques and tastes
hold them up to, expropriate them for,
and distance them from European refinement.
- Thank you so much. This was so wonderful.
And give me a appetite.
- (laughing)
- I wanted to take pictures of some of the recipes.
I think Kim has left the Zoom meeting.
So I propose that we just discuss,
if we have questions for Keja and we talk about
her presentation and then hopefully
Kim will join us back in a few minutes.
- I wonder whether you could talk a little bit,
especially if we envision a recording of this as an
opportunity for students to hear about your work.
So how do you come to a topic like this?
How did you discover it? How did it discover you?
How did you figure out that it was a book?
How did it, how did it take over your life
and demand that you write it as a book.
Sort of the evolution of a project like this,
would be really helpful to hear about it.
- Yeah, absolutely.
And yes, that is a good,
that is a fantastic description of the general trajectory.
So I work in Caribbean studies, but mostly literature,
not cookbooks, kind of traditional novel, short story,
storytelling spaces.
But I love eating, I love cooking.
So I always gather cookbooks wherever I go,
I gather cookbooks.
And then I, you know,
spend a lot of time reading them as much time reading them
as I do cooking from them because they're really fun.
And I started finding,
I realized at a certain point that I had a first,
a huge collection of Caribbean cookbooks.
And second that there's something really,
I kept talking about them and I kept running into people
who said to me, some version of,
"But why do you need a cookbook in the Caribbean?"
You know, Caribbean people have a long tradition
of passing on culinary knowledge in non-print culture
and print culture is really colonial.
So why cookbooks in the Caribbean?
So I started to read the cookbooks again,
and it really struck me that they're doing something much
different and more than just teaching people how to cook.
And so then I really started reading them for like,
what else are they doing?
And what struck me
is that they're this space in the colonial cookbooks,
they're the space where women get to write
and get to intervene in public discourse
in a way that's really rare and super colonialist,
but still rare for these women to be taking on that role.
And then once you hit independence,
getting close to independence, women start taking on this,
really, making these great arguments for food independence,
and national independence as tied to food independence,
and really speaking up and using it, like, quite explicit.
Like in Barbados, there's one of the first women senators
is also the writer of one of a whole bunch of cookbooks.
So really getting like this implication
of political advocacy and cookbook writing. It's huge.
And I started to notice that kind of across the Caribbean,
that in places where there are cookbooks in large volume
there's independence,
and as cookbooks peak independence happens.
So these really kind of crazy correlations.
And so then I started getting into them,
but it was because of the big spread correlations
that I realized it needed to be a book,
rather than a paper.
That each one individually is really cool,
but when you look at it together and you go, wait,
this is like a pattern across the Caribbean.
And in places where there still isn't independence
like Martinique and Guadalupe
and Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands,
the patterns look really different
and there's much less profound ability to get published.
These cookbooks that are deeply independent.
So made me feel like I had to have it
as a whole big project.
It has taken me a really long time,
because a big project does.
So I've been at this for, like, seven years now
and it is finally a completed manuscript under review.
So, you know, it will come together.
But boy, there were many moments when I thought,
why did I not just make a couple of articles?
Why did I think this had to be a whole book?
And as it is a whole book, I'm glad that it is.
- I think Laura, you had a question.
- Hi, Keja, congratulations.
It was so great to hear you read that.
I really enjoyed the juxtaposition of cooking
and writing about cooking in an academic sense
and tone and approach.
It was really delightful and I wish you the best for that.
That's great.
So are there chapters per cookbook?
Is that how you're approaching each one as though
an essay about that particular cookbook?
- I'm trying to be pretty comprehensive.
So it's chapters by region or by countries.
So I've got like a chapter on the colonial west Indies
and a chapter on
colonial Cuba and Puerto Rico
and a chapter on kind of neo-colonial Martinique, Guadalupe,
U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
And then moving into the post-colonial,
it's not as comprehensive,
but I've got a chapter on Cuba,
because it's really its own unique thing,
and a chapter on the west Indies
and a chapter on Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
- Oh my gosh. It sounds like heaven in print, really.
- (laughing)
- But the idea of approaching a community's history
through a cookbook and what people ate
and then layering in the lessons that you described,
the kind of social order, if it were,
is fascinating to me.
So I wonder if there's already a market
for this kind of a book or is this a first of its kind?
- So there have been some really fantastic books
done on this in African American cookbooks.
Toni Tipton-Martin has published
a couple of really fantastic works
and some others looking at American cookbooks.
And there's one that just came out,
looking at Spanish cookbooks.
So nobody has looked at the Caribbean in this way,
but it is definitely an emerging field
in terms of the basic concept.
So there's some really good stuff that's coming out.
- That's super exciting.
And then the last thing that really struck me
was the similarity with
Krishna Malik's book about environmentalism in India,
with women being the ones to notice the changes first.
And you mentioned that, you know,
the women are the ones who created this community
through the sharing of their recipes and food,
and it's set in a woman's environment.
So I'd love it if you could talk about that for a minute.
- Yeah. I think it's just, you know,
so frequently the domestic discourse is excluded right?
It's excluded from public sphere
and these kind of big concepts of the nation,
you know, national problems or international problems.
And at the same time,
a lot of where women are publishing, is often considered
too commercial to be worthy of academic consideration.
So, cookbooks and magazines and trade journals
that people might write in.
So I really think what's great,
the study of material culture in a lot of different fields
has really opened up the ability to look at
what women are producing.
And then once you start looking and you read
what those narratives say,
it's sort of like there's this explosion of,
wait a second, women have been documenting
what it looks like from the inside,
if you take the domestic sphere
as a kind of inside sphere, for a long time,
but who's been reading it or who's been listening to it
needs to be amplified.
- And that's why it's so exciting,
that you're bringing it to light.
- Yeah. And I'm really excited to hear about Kim's work.
Cause I think Kim's work looks at a very similar
basic conception of, let's look at a space,
that hasn't been given the consideration,
but I don't know the details. All I know is the outline,
but it feels really like there's a real synergy
in these projects.
- Yeah. And I'm sorry I messed up.
I don't know what happened.
Somehow I got kicked out and had to restart.
- Oh, don't worry about it. It happens.
- But I know when Keja and I were talking, it seemed that,
there would be.
And I can't wait to read your book.
So I think the leaf blowers are gone at least.
- Oh, good. Why don't we have you
give your presentation then?
- Sure. I will try.
One second.
Share screen.
Oh, I'm disabled from sharing at the moment.
- I just made you co-host.
- Okay.
Thanks.
Okay.
(keyboard typing)
Okay, is that working?
Okay, great.
So again, as Keja said,
thank you so much
to the Center for Research and Creative Activities.
It is very difficult to do research
with a four-four teaching load.
And the extra time that it allowed me,
really enabled me to push my project further
than it had gone before.
So I thought I'd tell you a little bit about it
and then maybe share with you some of what
I was able to accomplish, thanks to the time.
So my project in part stemmed from a sense of frustration
that feminist scholars
who are writing about the English Renaissance,
women and race hadn't fully examined the ways
that women were implicated in the development of racism
over the course of the period.
Too often, a lot of this work would represent
patriarchy, racism, and colonialism
as analogous systems of oppression
that were created and enacted by men
to subordinate, both women and other racial groups.
And sometimes this work would imply or even outright state
that women would have been incapable of participating
in such enterprises,
because of their own subordinate positions in society.
And yet it seemed significant to me,
that at the very moment that the English
began trying to colonize the Americas,
at the moment that the English started
trafficking in African slaves,
it was a woman, Elizabeth I,
who was on the throne.
And the second part of this project,
I was interested in thinking through
how it is that English people
came to see themselves as white.
Even as a little kid, I was preoccupied
with this question.
Why do we call ourselves "white people"?
What allowed us to start seeing ourselves as white?
It wouldn't be until later in the 17th century
that English men would start to consider themselves
as a white people for the first time.
But there was a lengthier history
that associated whiteness with beauty
that really seemed to be pushed forward
and get fused with the emerging discourses of race
during this particular time.
And so part of my argument is that
during the course of her reign,
Elizabeth harnessed some of the symbolic powers
of whiteness,
and used cosmetics to help justify her authority
as an unmarried and virgin queen.
She fused positive associations between whiteness
and virginity, beauty, virtue, purity, religion,
to ideas about nation and race
that were developing in the period.
And she set a standard for beauty,
for white beauty that others would start to emulate.
And it's striking how similar
some of her peers
look to Elizabeth
in their own portraits.
So writings about cosmetics and painting
are ubiquitous in men's writing from the period.
We find them in plays and poems and conduct books
and certain religious tracts.
And very often they're presented in a negative way.
And very often there's concern
about cosmetics ability to obscure
distinctions between women.
So in this one, by Barnaby Rich, for example,
he laments, he can "no longer tell a lady from a laundress.
"We can't distinguish women of honor
"from those who are of base parentage,
"whose best bringing up has been in the washing, starching,
"and scraping of trenches".
There were also some concerns about cosmetics
and their costs,
and there were foreign ingredients
imported from all over the world.
There was another writer, Phillip Stubbs,
who said they were,
"farfetched, dear bought and cunningly mingled together
"from stones, flowers, birds, beasts, fishes,
"and whatever Africa, Asia, America,
"sea, land, art, and industry could afford".
So the mingling of different ingredients
from different cultures was also of concern
during this time.
But while men can't keep themselves from talking about it,
women rarely acknowledged using cosmetics themselves.
And I argue this isn't very surprising,
because the culture in which they lived,
religious leaders would condemn cosmetics
as lying, as deception.
They were associated with idolatry.
And even secular wisdom advised women
to keep their use of makeup secretive.
This is Ovid's "Art of Love".
It was translated into English in the 16th century
and exceedingly popular.
And it argued that women should apply their makeup
outside of men's sight.
They should make sure that they keep their makeup boxes,
where men cannot see them.
And he says,
"Mind thou beauty, when we think thee sleeping,
"why should I know why thou art grown so fair?"
So cosmetics are all right,
as long as men don't know about them.
And it's interesting to me that even today,
we still see, cosmetics seem to be a practice
that women will do secretly away from men
and sometimes strive for a natural appearance.
Though women writers
rarely talk about cosmetics themselves,
I was able to dig up a few examples from some poems
that in their time,
existed only in manuscript.
And
in these poems,
they seem to acknowledge using cosmetics themselves.
In other works, when women talk about cosmetics,
they actually think through beauty practices
in a pretty sophisticated way.
And I think taken together,
they're pondering the limits of cosmetics.
And they're thinking through what kinds of powers
whiteness might afford them.
And what kinds of constraints
are imposed on them as well.
And what interested me most
was the ways that cosmetic practices allowed women to
sometimes challenge patriarchal strictures
and beauty cultures and men who would hold them
to certain standards of beauty,
while simultaneously
engaging in racism or classism at the same time.
So I have the first example,
is a poem
from manuscript.
This is Eleanora Finch.
She was a descendant of Sir Thomas Wyatt,
who was more well-known.
And in the poem, she presents herself as a scorned lover,
addressing her former suitor's
new love interest,
as she sits at her table, applying her makeup.
And she says,
"You might be worthier than I am, but
"she that I won the field from,
"was not any less fair."
So she's suggesting that there's a certain arbitrariness
to beauty.
That it seems to go against
some of the thinking of the time.
And she goes on to say that,
it's man's fickle heart,
not women's
manufactured beauty
or their innate beauty
that causes the man to turn from one woman to another.
She sidesteps any moral questions
about the use of cosmetics
and definitely transfers qualities that
polemicists writing against cosmetics
would associate with them,
like vanity, deception, inconstancy,
from men who paint to the men who would pursue them.
So this part where she says,
"To your dressing
"nor impart half so much of costs or art,
"powder, crisp, not curl your hair,
"scarce for you, he'll take that care."
She's pointing to a double standard where women are supposed
to beautify themselves for men,
but they don't get that in return.
And she cautions.
She's concerned with a power imbalance
between her and the men.
She also points out how a woman's beautifying practices
are they seek only to please,
but the male suitors conduct and matters of love
harms women.
The diligent effort,
a lady makes to preserve her beauty and apply her makeup
is easily undone.
In that second stanza,
"Through close contact with a male suitor
"whose breath alone is enough to ruin
"the effect of her make up."
And then she goes on to say
that the male suitors deep vowed love
is shorter lasting
and more false and more vain
than a single application of the lady's pure white tincture.
Makeup can be reapplied.
The fickle lover
cannot be brought back once he strays.
So these distinctions between dark and light or conventional
and Petrarchan poetry,
which the English inherited,
where usually one woman
is fair, and the other by definition is dark.
And it is the male who makes those distinctions
between them.
Finch's poem challenges this idea
and suggest there's a kind of solidarity between women,
but it is a solidarity that is still very limited
to three women at court,
who had once been pursued
by this particular person.
There's another example I'll share with you that engages
more directly with race.
And this is Frances Seymour, Lady Hartford.
She was known to be one of the most beautiful women
of her time.
She has a fascinating story.
In 1601, after the death of her husband,
who was a venture that she married below her station,
she was beset by suitors.
And after some consultations with her astrologer
and negotiations about a joint share,
she married a man who was 40 years her senior,
and very, very wealthy.
Once she
married him, one of her former suitors,
a man named George Rodney,
followed her to her new home in Wiltshire,
found a room at the nearby inn,
and sent her pages of verse describing his miseries
that he claimed were penned in his own blood.
This is so bizarre.
So he describes himself as too deeply wounded to live long.
And then in some of these lines that you see from
his elegy to himself,
he really blames Frances and her beauty for his suffering.
"It's nature's sin that mixed a mind
with a beauty so unkind."
And he uses these tropes
that are also associated with rhetoric against cosmetics.
She's a sweet poison, infectious jewel.
Poison and cosmetics were often talked about together.
And in response to his missive,
Lady Hertford set an extraordinary poem
of her own.
I don't know why it isn't anthologized everywhere,
because it's brilliant.
And in rhyming couplets, she constructs a point-by-point,
counter-argument where she questions Rodney's motives.
She says, he's driven by lust, not love.
She critiques his poetry.
And she scoffs at his suicidal threat,
saying he's being theatrical.
She concludes her poem by telling him to desist his suit,
and warns him to dare not contact her again.
Upon receipt of the letter,
apparently Rodney slit his own throat,
but not before pinning one final missive,
as his suicide note.
So this is
another example where
a woman comes close to acknowledging
her own painting, though.
Like Rodney, she uses language that allows
a little bit of room for ambiguity.
Maybe she's born with it or died in grain,
but maybe she's chosen to paint it.
But she asserts her ownership over her own beauty
in a way that suggests that she should be free
to do with her own appearance,
what she wishes.
She acknowledges the power
that beauty and painting afford her,
to win a desirable suitor,
but she refuses to accept responsibility
for Rodney's suffering or for any violence
that he or any other man might inflict.
And in the context of this poem, death and bloodshed,
it might refer to Rodney's own death,
but she also would have been familiar with so much
of the historical myths
circulating during this time,
about women who might be raped or even murdered
by men who desired them when they refused.
And what really interests me here,
is that she uses
language that really seems to invoke
slavery of the time.
"Small cause have I, the owner of my beauty,
"to rejoice that cannot take free passage in my choice,
"but for the fruitless painting of my cheeks,
"must even become a slave to what it likes,
"or be termed cruel."
And then she says,
"Is bondage the happiness that attends on those
"whom every 'fair' commends?
"Then surely better much it is to be
"rather than fair and thralldom, brown and free."
We know that at least some of the Seymour family wealth,
the wealth that she married into, came from the slave trade.
Her husband's uncle had actually provided one of the ships
that William Hawkins used
in some of his slave trading voyages.
And Frances following a third marriage,
that raised her status even higher,
she would go on to help fund a voyage of John Smith
into Virginia years later.
So she's intricately connected to what's happening
during this time.
And then if beauty's mirror reveals Rodney's error,
it seems to be because Frances' is reflection is white.
The implication here is that white women,
fair women are the ones who should be free.
Brown women are more properly held in bondage
or as slaves by English men.
It's whiteness that gives her the freedom to choose
who she's going to marry,
even to paint her cheeks.
And I think that this kind of attitude
is somewhat familiar
to feminist thinking today,
about whose interests are being served
when patriarchy is challenged?
When we look at the Women's March on Washington,
when we look at the Me Too movement,
whose suffering is being privileged
and whose is being denied
or overlooked?
Clearly Francies Hertford is not suffering
(laughs) in bondage.
Clearly her fairness is not making her a slave
and it's sort of trivializing
the experiences that darker-skinned women
would actually go through during the time.
So that is what I've brought to share with you today.
And I'm happy to answer questions as well.
- Thank you so much, Kim.
This was really, really interesting.
And I have to say as a political scientist,
where we're just so used to looking at the data
and the facts, this is just so refreshing to see that power
manifest itself
in different ways and ways that may be overlooked sometimes.
And I just want to add that when I created this panel,
originally, there was going to be a third presenter.
She's on sabbatical, so she could not join us,
but her focus was on robots and gender biases
expressed through robots.
So it would have been also fascinating
to add this third dimension, but already,
this is already so much,
so I'm glad, I'm glad we're having this discussion.
So I don't know if there are questions or comments
to Kim's presentation.
- I'd like to just add a parallel question to the question
that I asked Keja.
And Kim, I think this is before you rejoined us.
And that was sort of thinking about
recording this for students,
who might eventually be thinking of engaging in their own
research and writing paths.
If you could talk a little bit more about
how you came to this particular book,
of why it was a book and why it took this form
and just a little bit about the journey.
- Oh, goodness.
I mean, I think,
as I maybe acknowledged just a little bit,
even as a child, I was I was a little bit curious about,
you know, why do we call ourselves white people?
And what's going on with that?
And my parents are from Kentucky
and my grandmother would say, like,
"Don't play with the black kids across the street."
And I was puzzled.
I was puzzled about what was going on with that.
So I had an interest
in what's what's going on with race and whiteness
from pretty early on.
And then when I got into graduate school and started
immersing myself in Renaissance literature,
I noticed references to painting and cosmetics popping up
everywhere, which really surprised me.
And then when I came back
to some of the work that I did in graduate school,
trying to expand and launch the dissertation into a book,
it's impossible not to think about racial issues
that are happening during our own time.
And some of the critiques that have been made about
white feminism,
and what it was missing really seemed to speak to me
and led me to make connections,
between what seemed to be a gap
in what some of the feminist critics and scholars
about race in the period were missing.
So that's sort of how the project evolved.
- I have kind of a thought and question,
And I guess it's to both Keja and Kimberly.
Again, going back to
just the fact that this type of research
is novel and it's not necessarily,
it's not the traditional way in which people would
study power and forms of domination.
And yet, you know, there is so much to be learned,
but is it difficult?
So I know, Keja,
you said you've collected a lot of cookbooks over time,
but I'm sure not all of them
turned out to have interesting content.
And there might be some that
you might have heard of, but it might be difficult
to obtain and same thing for you, Kimberly.
Basically the question is how do you get
the evidence that you need?
Is it difficult to find the evidence that you need
to continue your research?
Because it is such an unusual, in both cases,
an unusual source,
and there's probably not a repository somewhere,
like an archive or a database, you know,
that you can go in and just download what you need.
- But somehow,
but sometimes,
you get lucky.
You know, Keja can probably relate to this, too,
exploring the archives and coming across something that you
hadn't expected is exhilarating.
But over the past, you know,
five years or so,
early English books online
made their collections fully searchable.
You can search, you know,
within English books published from
15th century up to
18th century.
You can search for phrases inside the books.
Like you used to only be able to search for titles
and you'd get things that were in black letter.
And it was really hard to make out the font,
and you'd strain your eyes.
And with this development, oh, it was such a game changer.
So that really helped me
with my research and even Google books.
I was able to access through Google books,
these Italian books of secrets
and things that were written in French,
and it's amazing how much things have changed.
I don't know for you, Keja,
if you experienced anything similar.
- There is much less digitization of Caribbean materials.
So I think it's a great question, Vanessa,
because I think it's really a question of archive.
So I've run a lot into the question of the problems of
archiving in the Caribbean and the ways that,
I have a hard enough time finding these books,
but I can find them much more easily
than most people in the Caribbean.
And that's the other thing that's crazy, right?
So where the archives are located,
are generally in the colonial centers
and in the United States.
And because digitization is really low
of Caribbean cookbooks,
people in the Caribbean often can't even access
digitized versions of them.
So there's also sort of my awareness,
that I actually have greater access here.
And so part of my hope is to really,
I'm including as much as many, like all those cookbooks,
I've got sidebars of as the many recipes as I can
in the book, because I'm at least trying to
help make the recipes accessible again.
But the other thing is it's really random.
So I have had a much more random experience.
So, you know, I look through and I think
I found every possible cookbook,
but a lot of them are not,
I look in WorldCat and a lot
of them aren't cataloged in WorldCat.
So then like I met this woman who was a bookseller in
Barbados and she has been one of my greatest sources.
Like she just sent me a book. She was like, you know,
"I found a book that's a photocopy of this
"1937 Grenadian thing
"that somebody bound at some point
"and written by some guy who worked for
"the Grenadian government in the agricultural department.
"Do you want it?"
Yes. Yes.
So it's a really an under-collected archive
and one that I don't think I found a single book
that I don't like find totally fascinating,
because even if they're weird.
And even if it's just,
these are a lot of the cookbooks of the early ones are
copies, but they're unacknowledged.
So I'll find a book and I'm like,
I've read these recipes before. Right.
And it's just that someone else redid them
and sometimes change the title a little
or it's anonymous or they swap their name on it,
which still happens.
So the, like the web of,
but it's really part of the web of ownership. Right.
And who owns things and who holds things and who holds the
archives and who circulates them.
So tracing just the publication and circulation histories
of cookbooks,
is itself really a fascinating part of the project.
And I've got to figure out who to donate.
Now I have a huge collection
that I need to donate to somebody.
- Did you use the Schlesinger collection at all?
And would that be an appropriate repository?
- Yes, but I don't want to keep them in the United States.
- Ah, okay.
- Yeah, the Schlesinger has one of the,
they have the best collection of American cookbooks, period.
Then they have some gems
of Caribbean cookbooks.
And New York Public Library has a lot.
Boston Public Library has a whole bunch of French colonial
cookbooks. I have no idea how they got them,
but I also spent a lot of time finding things that are
listed in Boston Public Library
and then going to the library and they're not there.
And the librarian remembers
the guy who was librarian before him.
And yes, there's probably a box somewhere. Like, yeah.
- Sorry. You had a question.
- Yes. I just wanted to react to Kimberly's reading.
I really enjoyed what you presented today.
Thank you so much.
And you know,
to think about cosmetics is having that much power
and impact
on women's agency, actually,
because if you think about the cosmetic empires that we have
now and the businesses, I'm sure you got into this.
It is fascinating. I mean,
it's both a gilded cage and also a platform for women.
So it's very interesting work. Yeah.
- Yeah, exactly.
You know, I think, you know,
feminists among themselves can't decide, you know,
is it an empowering practice or is it a sign of
being subordinated to
these standards?
Yeah. It's both a neither
and it's complicated.
- That's great. Makes for great reading.
- I hope so.
- Kimberly, do you, at all, in your book,
do you also talk about men's use of cosmetics?
Cause I know this was also a practice, right?
We use a lot of powder, historically,
like around this same time.
I think I'm not really sure about the exact time period,
but is that something you discuss as well?
- Not, not as much.
Certainly they were associated primarily with women
and men who were white,
were often, during this particular time, were perceived
as effeminate.
So there is a time that it becomes a little bit
more accepted.
And sometimes when women are defending their
use of cosmetics, they say,
"Well like you comb your hair
"and you do these other things",
but they don't talk as much about men using makeup yet.
- Okay, Keja, go ahead.
- Kim, I thank you so much,
I love that the presentation.
I was really curious about the word "fair".
How does that become "beautiful"?
- Yeah.
Yeah. (laughing)
So, I looked into this that at some point too,
and I found something that said English
is the only language where fair and beautiful
start to mean white as well.
Which was fascinating.
I don't know every line. I'm not sure if it's true,
but it's something interesting to think about.
Yeah.
I'm not sure exactly,
where that association originates,
but it seems to become stronger
and stronger.
So Petrarch, of course,
in writing his poems and praising Laura,
like he describes her as fair.
And that's Italian.
But there's also in the Italian Renaissance,
sort of a shift in which the Virgin Mary
starts appearing as white.
So, during the Renaissance and other European countries,
which were already exploring other parts of the world
and coming into contact with African people,
there had already been a bit of a shift
towards idealizing white beauty.
And that I think seems to get
imported into England over time.
- Of course there's Snow White.
So if we want to talk about popular.
- Yeah.
- But my understanding was that Elizabeth used the powder
to cover up the scars on her face from,
was it smallpox?
- Yeah. So a lot of historians suggest
that she started using cosmetics
after a bout with smallpox
and also to obscure the marks of aging,
as her reign went on.
But there are also ways to use makeup,
that don't necessarily involve whitening.
So I think
that's significant.
I think she very deliberately made use of some the
positive associations with whiteness
to assert her own power.
And she also, in her speeches,
you can see her saying to the English people,
"I'm purely English, I'm born of two English parents."
You know, her sister married before her,
married a Spaniard.
Spaniards were supposed to have mingled blood
and her mother was Spanish.
So she really insisted,
"I'm pure and I'm English and I'm not marrying,
"because I'm going to preserve that English pure identity."
And the whiteness in her case seems to reinforce the point,
- Well, thank you so much to both of you.
This was really,
really an interesting panel and so excited that we could
make it happen.
I want to thank everybody for joining us and of course,
Keja and Kimberly for accepting to share
their research with us.
I also want to let you know that our next panel
will be November 1st.
So it's the next panel organized by
The Center for Research and Creative Activities.
And this one will be on
Critical Perspectives, Spaces, Borders, and Territories.
So it will be also advertised through the same channels,
like the academy newsletter,
like where you've seen it in this one posted.
And I hope you can join us for that next one as well.
But again, thank you.
And I look forward to seeing you all on Zoom
or in person on campus.
- Thank you, Vanessa.
- Bye-bye thanks so much.
- Bye.
- Thank you, Vanessa.
- [Vanessa] Bye.