- Speaker: Ashanté Reese, PhD, The University of Texas at Austin
- Event Series: Anthropology Colloquium
- Date: Monday, February 9
- Time: 3 p.m.
- Location: Gambrell 429
Abstract
Sugar production has shaped the entire world—geographically, socially, and culturally. This presentation explores sugar not as a commodity we consume but as something that captures: bodies, land, and our very imaginations. Using the 2018 discovery of 95 prisoners’ graves in Sugar Land, Texas, Dr. Reese examines sugar’s production and distribution as a technology—a man-made solution to an insatiable appetite for sweetness—that takes on a carceral function in relation to Black lives through established partnerships between 19th- and 20th-century sugar companies and the Texas penitentiary system.
Through examinations of media reports, archaeological evidence, and archival records related to Texas’s early sugar industry alongside the history of Texas prisons, this presentation interrogates how public–private partnerships in Texas created infrastructures of violence that continue to inform and imperil Black lives in “the city that sugar built.”
Speaker Bio
Dr. Ashanté M. Reese earned a PhD in Anthropology from American University and is an Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Reese works at the intersection of critical food studies and Black geographies, examining the ways Black people produce and navigate food-related spaces.
Her celebrated works include the book Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C., the co-edited volume Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice, and the forthcoming book Gather: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness. Dr. Reese is currently working on a cultural history of sugar and Sugar Land, Texas, in which she explores the spatial, economic, and carceral implications of sugar and the sometimes contradictory and deadly sweetness that marks Black life.