Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
| Created: | 2020-03-05 11:21 |
|---|---|
| Institution: | Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities |
| Description: | 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 is 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 26 April 2020). The exhibition, curated by Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu, explores 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. |
| Website: | http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/28582 |
Media items
This collection contains 18 media items.
Media items
0 - Welcome and Opening - Victoria Avery
Welcome and Opening
Victoria Avery (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Co-curator of Feast & Fast exhibition)
Summary
The pineapple is an emblem of power, promise and...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 1: The Global Pineapple - Melissa Caldwell
Melissa Caldwell (Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz, and editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture)
‘The Pineapple Between Tropical Imaginaries and American...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 1: The Global Pineapple - Peter Crane
Peter Crane (President, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, USA; former Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) [recorded video presentation]
‘Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis and...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 1: The Global Pineapple - Rebecca Earle
Session 1: The Global Pineapple
Chair: Melissa Calaresu (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)
Rebecca Earle (School of Comparative American Studies, Warwick)
‘From the...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 2: The Edible Pineapple - Ivan Day
Session 2: The Edible Pineapple
Chair: Deborah Krohn (Associate Professor, Bard Graduate Center, New York)
Ivan Day (Independent food historian)
‘As if Rosewater, Wine and...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 2: The Edible Pineapple - Richard A Hawkins
Richard A. Hawkins (Reader in History, University of Wolverhampton)
Pineapple Processing and Canning from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-First Century...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 4: The Replicated Pineapple - Emma Spary
Session 4: The Replicated Pineapple
Chair: Francesca Beauman (Author of The Pineapple: King of fruits)
Emma Spary (Reader in History of Modern European Knowledge,...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 4: The Replicated Pineapple - Kasia Boddy
Kasia Boddy (Reader in American Literature, English, Cambridge)
The Poetic Pineapple: Some Literary and Filmic Uses of the Fruit
Summary
The pineapple is an emblem of...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 4: The Replicated Pineapple - Melissa Calaresu
Melissa Calaresu (Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)
Pineapples and Pomegranates: Representing and Eating Exotic Fruit at the Early...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 5: The Iconic Pineapple - Jonathan Swinton
Jonathan Swinton (author of Alan Turing's Manchester (2019))
The Beauty Myth: Why Pineapples Don't Need Protractors
Summary
The pineapple is an emblem of power, promise...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 5: The Iconic Pineapple - Julie Hochstrasser
Session 5: The Iconic Pineapple
Chair: Dániel Margócsy (Lecturer in Science, Technology and Medicine before 1800, History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge)
Julie...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 5: The Iconic Pineapple - Kathryn Jones
Kathryn Jones (Senior Curator, Decorative Arts, Royal Collection Trust)
‘A Profusion of Pines’: The Pineapple in Architecture and the Decorative Arts...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 6: The Cultivated Pineapple - Johanna Lausen-Higgins
Johanna Lausen-Higgins (Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh)
Pineapple Mania - The Art of Cultivation in Eighteenth Century Britain
Summary
The pineapple is an emblem of...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 6: The Cultivated Pineapple - Lavinia Maddaluno
Lavinia Maddaluno (Warburg/I Tatti Joint Fellow)
Pineapples, Roman Aristocracy and the Pope in Enlightenment Rome
Summary
The pineapple is an emblem of power, promise and...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 7: The Political Pineapple - Henry Knight Lozano
Session 7: The Political Pineapple
Chair: Melissa L. Caldwell (Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz, and editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture)
Henry Knight Lozano...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 7: The Political Pineapple - Howard Griffiths
Howard Griffiths (Professor of Plant Ecology, Plant Sciences, and Co-Chair of Cambridge Global Food Security IRC, Cambridge)
Domestication of Wild Pine: How the Pineapple...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 7: The Political Pineapple - Inanna Hamati-Ataya
Inanna Hamati-Ataya (Director, Centre for Global Knowledge Studies, CRASSH)
'The Traveling Pineapple: A Political History'
Summary
The pineapple is an emblem of power,...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020
Session 7: The Political Pineapple - Martin Mowforth
Martin Mowforth (Visiting Specialist in Tourism and Development, Plymouth Business School, Plymouth)
Dirty Pineapples from Costa Rica
Summary
The pineapple is an emblem...
Collection: Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte
Institution: Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Created: Fri 6 Mar 2020