Project description
The untold stories of colonial women and enslaved cooks
The historical voices of women and enslaved cooks in the Portuguese empire’s domestic colonial kitchens (1450-1600) have long been silent. The untold stories of their mobility, agency and labour in shaping colonial food cultures remain obscured, overshadowed by more traditional narratives. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the CORE project aims to unravel the intricate threads of colonial recipes. It will cast a spotlight on the pivotal roles these marginalised figures played, sparking vital conversations around heritage, gender, race and class in the context of the empire’s culinary legacy. By spotlighting colonial recipes, CORE highlights ‘subaltern’ mobility, the intertwining of gender, race and class, and the pivotal role of colonial households.
Objective
CORE (Colonial Recipes, Then and Now) investigates how domestic colonial food cultures in the Portuguese empire (1450-1600) reflect the mobility, agency, labour, and knowledge of women and enslaved cooks; and how colonial recipes can create space for more nuanced conversations around colonial heritage. The project takes a ‘global history’ approach to the empire, examining the extent to which the mobility of people, foods, labour, and knowledge between key port cities shaped colonial food cultures. By focusing on domestic spaces, it places women and enslaved cooks, who did the labour of food preparation, centre stage. In this way, the project revalorises domestic spaces as sites of global exchange, which have been largely excluded from studies of global history, as well as insisting on the importance of gender to understand the complexities of the relations between mobility, food, and empire. By spotlighting colonial recipes, CORE will spark new scholarly conversations about the insights these texts offer into: ‘subaltern’ mobility, creativity, and adaptability; the intersecting production of gender, race, and class; and colonial households as the centre of social provisioning and wider infrastructures of empire, examining how new colonial cuisines intersect with colonial regimes of trade, agricultural production, and domestic slavery. It makes three historiographical interventions, namely it: (1) responds to calls to write a global history of the early modern Portuguese empire; (2) brings the ‘new imperial history’ further into dialogue with a history of the Portuguese empire by showing how food illuminates colonial politics, especially negotiations around gender, race, and class; and (3) contributes to public debate around the production of heritage about the colonial past, using colonial recipes to interrogate the multiple valences and contradictions of the empire, and its legacies in the present.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
1600 189 Lisboa
Portugal