Spices, Mangos and Sugar. From Robinson Crusoe’s Diet to the Representations of Food in Contemporary Caribbean Postcolonial Literature

The article surveys representations of food in literature located in Caribbean from the early-eighteenth- century colonialist novel Robinson Crusoe to contemporary postcolonial fiction. The novels demonstrate both political and poetic features in the two key phases of the history of the novel genre. Firstly, the article points out how the upper class modern Western culture of taste required colonies, and secondly, how food that originally represented colonialism transformed into an element establishing Caribbean identities in the novels of Michelle Cliff, Zee Edgell and Merle Collins.