Overview

The pineapple’s ‘discovery’ by European colonisers in the late fifteenth century and its remarkable global trajectory – from an early modern object of rarity, desire, and horticultural innovation to a cheap, canned consumable and fair-trade logo today – is a story of modern globalisation. The Pineapple from Domestication to Commodification is a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary volume intended to provoke timely debate and generate radical rethinking of an overly familiar fruit with associations from luxury to kitsch. It deliberately problematizes the pineapple by investigating understudied tensions between its representational power and the historical and political contexts of its worldwide production and consumption. This connects the global and local at the heart of contemporary debates about the nature and origins of our food. It will have cross-disciplinary appeal for scholars of politics, economics, history, plant sciences, food, and material culture as well as for broader audiences interested in food, gardening, the environment, and visual arts.

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9781836245933

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Victoria Avery has been Keeper of European Sculpture & Decorative Arts at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, since 2010 prior to which she was Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Warwick. Vicky’s primary field of expertise is European sculpture from 1400 to the present day but she has broad knowledge of the materiality, making, usage, collecting and display of early modern European decorative arts. She has curated numerous research-led interdisciplinary exhibitions including Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe (2019–2020), from which this book emerges. Melissa Calaresu is the Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, and co-curator, with Victoria Avery, of the Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Feast & Fast: The art of food in Europe, 1450-1800 (London: Philip Wilson, 2019). She is a cultural historian whose research interests include the history of food, the representation of urban space, and material culture in early modern Italy. Recent publications have focused on selling food on the street, urban kitchens, and the Grand Tour of the eighteenth-century Welsh painter, Thomas Jones. She is co-editor of the journal, Global Food History.

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