Skin and Starch

Skin and Starch traces the movements and meanings of manioc, also known as cassava or yuca, across the Atlantic world to show how this tropical plant sustained both colonial exploitation and assertions of Black and Indigenous humanity. Isabel Bradley follows manioc from Caribbean forest gardens to slaving ships, from plantation provision grounds to maroon subsistence networks, to reveal how transplantations of this tuberous root helped to shape human projects of subjugation and self-making. Drawing from an extensive archive of natural histories, plantation records, printed images, material culture, and francophone Caribbean literature and art, Bradley argues that embodied encounters between manioc and its growers informed modes of perception and possibility for subjects navigating colonial modernity. Skin and Starch presents a dynamic study of the diverse knowledges produced in the orbit of manioc cultivation and the generative forms of resistance and worldmaking that emerged within and against colonial monoculture and its violence.