Fifteen Eighty Four

Recent U.S. tariff policies have made mundane commodities remarkably visible, with almost every week bringing news about the logistics of importing or exporting essential items, from hamburgers to cement. The results are sometimes bizarre: a recent House hearing saw the U.S. commerce secretary insist that ‘we cannot build bananas in America’, in response to a suggestion that the fruit should be produced domestically.[i] This argument echoed a previous debate in Leftist corners of the internet, regarding whether, in the event of a socialist revolution, Americans should (or could) eat bananas for breakfast.[ii] The humble banana here, across both sides of the political spectrum, became the catalyst for larger, often heated debates about food sovereignty, international labour markets, and the future of the planet. Perhaps it’s the fruit’s ordinariness – the way it sits innocently on kitchen tables even in regions inimical to its production – that makes it a powerful vector for such conversations. Taken for granted, a banana becomes confronting when we are asked to really read it, that is, to connect our daily consumer habits to the international inequalities that make them possible.

Almost two centuries after Marx’s critique of the commodity, the question of how to ‘read’ an object like a banana – or how to situate it amid the complex web of social and ecological relations that bring it to the table – ­remains as relevant as it ever was. This has not been lost on historians, who have charted the ‘lives’ of individual objects through the medium of the ‘commodity biography’, as exemplified in such colourful titles as Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World,or The Secret Life of Lobsters. The genre has been criticized, however, for its tendency to celebrate objects like bananas as the heroes of capitalist success stories.[iii] And it is here, in the absence of a properly critical perspective, that our recent volume, Commodities and Literature, enters, with its emphasis on literary studies as a field especially attuned to the problem of how to read the commodity today.

Literature, our volume insists, has always been fundamentally bound up with commodities. From the early literary cultures of the coffeehouse to the production of cheap paperbacks, commodities have shaped the way texts are written, circulated, and consumed. Equally, literature has opened up new perspectives on the worlds of commodities and the social, economic, political, and environmental transformations that they bring into being. Take the example of the eighteenth-century ‘it-narrative’, a genre in which banal objects such as coins and pin-cushions embark on adventures amid the new worlds of global trade. Or consider, to list some of the other examples from our volume, the realist novels of the nineteenth century, with their endless catalogues of curiosities and bric-à-brac; the colonial adventure narratives of the late nineteenth century, with their quests for resources such as ivory, opium or whale oil; the poetry of the postcolonial plantation, or the commodity-futures imagined in more recent forms such as ‘petrofiction’ and ‘hydrofiction’. Working with these and other genres, Commodities and Literature shows how texts from a range of periods and locations have been bound up with the production and consumption of commodities.

As a collectively authored body of research – with chapters on the global cultures of tea, coffee, coal, paper, sugar, rum, opium, guano, tin, soy, water, oil and lithium, among others – Commodities and Literature explores the critical possibilities that emerge when we read for commodities. Whether we’re observing a silk slipper or a tobacco pipe in a Victorian novel, or encountering the ‘curse’ of sugar in a Guyanese plantation poem or the disaster of an oil spill in a West African story, reading for commodities means connecting the intimacies of domestic consumption to the broadest currents of global history. It involves shuttling between different communities and environments, layering different moments of history, and linking these back to ourselves as readers – and consumers – of the text. To return to the example with which we began, consider the appearance of a banana in a novel like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Far from a trivial detail, the commodity in these texts becomes the vector for a larger, complex story about the history of US dependence on imported tropical goods as this informs the daily dependencies of past and present. Defamiliarized through the literary techniques of modernism and magic realism, the banana here is anything but banal.

[i] ‘A Banana a Day Keeps the Tariffs Away’: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/howard-lutnick-trump-tariffs-bananas-b2765272.html

[ii] ‘Will There Be Bananas Under Socialism?’ https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/07/will-there-be-bananas-under-socialism.html

[iii] Bruce Robbins, ‘Commodity Histories’, PMLA 120. 2 (2005), 454-463.

Commodities and Literature
by Sudesh Mishra and
Caitlin Vandertop