Paper short abstract:

How did sugar produce specific meanings and practices in Lusophone colonial Africa? I explore its historical significance for Portuguese Mozambique in European imperial context, and consider a plantation club’s role in delineating spaces of leisure, racial exclusion, and elite cosmopolitanism.

Paper long abstract:

Sugar has long been associated with imperial rule, to which Sydney Mintz's (1985) foundational text on the commodity and its histories, violent productions, and cultural associations attests. In this paper I ask: In what ways did sugar produce specific cultural meanings and practices, particularly in Lusophone colonial Africa? Considering two interrelated subjects, I explore connections between sugar and imaginations of social and racial refinement, leisure and luxury, and Lusophone cosmopolitanism in Mozambique. First, I address sugar's important symbolic role in Portugal's assertion of imperial rule, vis-à-vis anxieties over more formidable British economic and regional power. I then examine the sugar-producing town of Xinavane, Mozambique, and its delineations of rurality and urbanity along racial and spatial lines. Focusing on the plantation club, I argue that particular spaces and practices of leisure and pleasure were created through European-African circuits, imaginations, and racialized sensibilities around urban and elite sociality. These senses and practices depended in turn on the measurement of 'refined' work and leisure against the coerced African agrarian labors needed for sugar cultivation. Ultimately, these imaginaries - and their material articulations - worked to prove Portuguese racial superiority over Africans, and solidify Portugal's status as a 'true' European power. I engage sugar's cultural and material resonances to consider its relevance to Mozambican sugar and its production today.