Postcolonial studies, in its concentration on culture and subjectivity, has sometimes seemed to lose sight of the fact that colonialism was largely motivated by economic concerns. The colonies provided both a cheap labour force and a supply of raw materials to be exported to Europe. From cotton to gold to tea, colonial economies were driven by the export of a range of commodities; among these, a major subcategory has always been food and drink, and this is especially true of the Caribbean. Originally the ‘spice islands’, the Caribbean soon devoted itself to the production of cane sugar for the European market; the decline of this market resulting from the expansion of European sugar beet in the late nineteenth century meant that the region subsequently had to diversify, but the diversification remained within a range of products for oral consumption: rum, coffee, tobacco, bananas, pineapples, mangoes, avocadoes. On most of the islands this agricultural sector has now been overtaken by tourism as the major source of revenue; but in the European imagination, the Caribbean, it would seem, is still associated with eating and drinking.

More recently, one of the French Caribbean's main exports to metropolitan France has been novels. These have to be so exported because the islands are too small to sustain a viable independent publishing industry; but it is equally true that the global publishing industry has over the past twenty to thirty years become far keener than previously to publish novels from Third World writers, creating a market in what Graham Huggan terms ‘the postcolonial exotic’. And in the case of novels from Martinique, Guadeloupe and Haiti, what is most striking about their marketing is the extent to which it presents them as edible: as though the association between the Caribbean and food products is so powerful that the most obvious mode of consumption of its literary products is also oral. There is, in other words, a correlation between the real export of food products and the construction of an imagination in which representations of the Caribbean landscape and society have become objects of consumption in the most basic sense.

Nor is this phenomenon restricted to the more openly commercial discourses of publishers’ blurbs or reviews in the mainstream press; it occurs also in the work of academic critics.