University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The Progress of Sugar: Consumption as Complicity in Children’s Books about Slavery and Manufacturing, 1790-2015

Hoiem, Elizabeth M.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/107744

Description

Title
The Progress of Sugar: Consumption as Complicity in Children’s Books about Slavery and Manufacturing, 1790-2015
Author(s)
Hoiem, Elizabeth M.
Issue Date
2020-07-03
Keyword(s)
  • history of children’s literature
  • slavery
  • abolitionist literature
  • race in children’s literature
  • representations of work
  • consumerism
  • manufacturing
  • children’s nonfiction
  • production story
  • African Americans
  • picturebooks
  • science in children's literature
Geographic Coverage
  • Great Britain
  • United States
Abstract
This paper analyzes “production stories,” a genre of information literature and media responsible for teaching children how everyday things are made. As nineteenth-century families increasingly consumed tropical commodities produced by slave labor, including sugar, tea, coffee, rum, and tobacco, the production story developed in Britain and the United States as a way to explain to children where everyday household goods originate, making global trade networks visible in the home. These “production stories” developed strategies for raising or eliding ethical questions posed by who makes things, under what conditions, and for whom. Focusing on stories of sugar production, I find that production stories reveal surprising details about technical processes for making things, but conceal the human cost of production. They also end with consumption, when children use the products, symbolically affirming the conditions under which they were made. Drawing on scholarship from the history of technology and the history of the Atlantic slave trade, I contend that problematic representations of manufacturing processes feed into and support whitewashed histories for children. I conclude by analyzing contemporary picturebooks that resist certain genre patterns and encourage positive identification with enslaved black characters, who like child readers, are at once makers, readers, and consumers.
Publisher
Springer Nature B.V.
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/107744
DOI
https ://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-020-09411-y
Sponsor(s)/Grant Number(s)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities
  • Friends of the Princeton Library Visiting Scholars Grant
Copyright and License Information
copyright for the manuscript held by Elizabeth Massa Hoiem; copyright for the published article held by Springer Nature B.V.

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