Imperial Recipes · Food in the Spanish and British Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century: Encounters, Exchanges, Identities

This research project aims to compare the British and Spanish empires in the nineteenth-century Caribbean. More specifically, it focuses on the discourse on food in the British and Spanish colonies. This project stems from my doctoral research. My aim is both to find a connection between the ways in which food and diet were perceived and discussed in the British and Spanish Caribbean colonies and to evaluate the differences in the discourse on food in the two empires, with the objective of analyzing colonial identities and imperial ideology in the Caribbean through the lens of food. My focus on food and diet sheds light on how encounters, negotiations, appropriations, rejections and interactions of culinary practices are more than just a matter of human nutrition but rather concern fundamental issues as the construction of identities, asymmetries of power, agency of the subaltern and mutual influences. The basic assumption of this project is therefore an analysis of the relationship between food, identity and power.