The Power of Red

Is the Color the Commodity?

            In reading Amy Greenfield’s A Perfect Red I was constantly finding myself asking the question of what the true commodity in her history was. Obviously from the title of the book and the narrative, Greenfield seeks to make the color red the valued commodity and her arguments are very interesting. The use of the “red” from cochinilla as a form of currency and also as an item used to satisfy taxation would seemingly make the color itself the commodity. However, the cochinilla is what everyone is really after since it produces the brightest most vibrant reds, and therefore, does that make cochinilla the true commodity? Or perhaps, it’s not even the cochinilla, it’s the power itself of being able to control the production and distribution of products dyed by the cochinilla that the Spanish empire guarded so strongly.

            I find myself constantly reconsidering the definition of “commodity” and often that evolving definition has a great deal to do with the correlation between the established product being examined by the author and the agency given to the main actors in the narrative. The main product does not always end up being the true commodity, at least from certain perspectives, as the agency that the author shoulders certain parties or things with in the historical narrative grows or weakens. The agency in Greenfield’s book seems to mainly fall on the controlling parties of the cochinilla production and trade process, which for a great majority of the book is the Spanish empire. I felt in Judith Carney’s Black Rice that both labor and knowledge of slaves was the true commodity being traded and exploited by the controllers of the market, which may lean heavily away from the more concrete, product based definition the class originally came up with for “commodity”. Again, with Greenfield, I find myself distracted by the possibility of the abstract being the main commodity in the sense that the true trade of goods in this narrative is the fluctuation of power and control, not necessarily the color red itself.