Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte

Power, Promise, Politics: The Pineapple from Columbus to Del Monte's image
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.

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Media items

0 - Welcome and Opening - Victoria Avery

   81 views

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

   49 views

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

   0 views

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

   53 views

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

   61 views

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

   49 views

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

   63 views

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

   52 views

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

   64 views

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

   45 views

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

   44 views

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

   47 views

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

   70 views

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

   42 views

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

   33 views

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

   40 views

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

   55 views

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

   52 views

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