Project description
Food in colonial heritage production
The role of food in colonial heritage production remains poorly understood. The EU-funded CORE project aims to explore how the mobility of people, foods, labour, and knowledge between significant port cities of the early modern Portuguese empire (1450-1600) influenced colonial food cultures. It will focus on women and enslaved cooks who played crucial roles in food preparation and colonial recipes. The findings will shed light on the significance of gender in comprehending the intricate connections between mobility, food, and empire. CORE seeks to contribute to the creation of a global history of the Portuguese empire and illustrate how food impacted colonial politics, particularly in terms of gender, race, and class negotiations.
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 (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- social scienceslawhuman rightshuman rights violationshuman trafficking
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
1600 189 Lisboa
Portugal