Black Rice

Black Rice, by Judith A. Carney, embarks on a journey to restore the crucial historical role West Africans played in the development of American rice cultivation. Carney refutes the myths that Europeans introduced rice to Africa and then transmitted rice growing techniques to the Americas. In her attempt to place West Africans in their proper historical role, Carney succeeds in restoring their agency. The West Africans in Carney’s narrative are dynamic groups from various cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Their experience with rice cultivation was well established prior to European contact. Their knowledge, technologies, and techniques became essential to the adaptation of the Carolina landscape for intensive rice cultivation.  Carney asks readers to modify their understanding of the Columbian Exchange by placing importance on the transference of the systems of knowledge surrounding rice production, rather than on the cereal itself.

Carney’s work focuses almost exclusively on the production of rice, and, while she does pay some attention to global demand, largely ignores rice consumption. This is one area I wish she would have expanded on, but I understand that consumption was not the focus of her work. She follows more of a commodity chain approach, and, in that regard, I would align her more to Mintz out of the books we have read so far. However, she leaves the chain unfinished, with marketing and consumption absent.

Carney believes that West Africans are the primary agents of change throughout this work. The changes being wrought are: the ascendance of rice to its place as a global dietary staple and the adaptation of West African techniques to new geographic locales as the result of the Atlantic slave trade. While this book is about change, I also believe it is a book about persistence. Much of West African rice growing culture – from tools and techniques to gender specialized labor tasks – are transmitted wholesale to the Americas with little to no change.

Although Carney’s purpose is to restore West African agency and rice culture to its prominent place, she does not neglect the commodity itself. She provides an in depth analysis of the history of the cereal outside the confines of social relations. One of the startling realizations for me was that it seems highly probable that Africa possessed its own indigenous rice species (I had assumed it was transferred from Asia through some sort of contact with the Arab world), possibly dating as far back as antiquity.

Judith A. Carney’s Black Rice succeeds in its mission to refute the racist interpretations of African contributions to the Americas. For me, her work fits my current definition of commodity history by placing rice as a commodity within its appropriate social history.