Presenters:
Scott Alves Barton
Cookware transforms raw foodstuffs into cooked dishes, signaling the transformation of nature, clay or iron, to culture as a vessel or tool. As such these vessels can be seen to have had power or agency, best epitomized in Western epistemes via Hamlet’s three witches’ chant, “Double double toil and trouble…Fire burn and cauldron bubble,” or in the tools and vessels used in African Diaspora religions, the conjure pots: including ìgbá/assentos/ fundamentos, nganga/prenda, and the opon Ifá and iroke Ifá, (the Babalawo’s divination tray and wand). Yet, in everyday usage, the intrinsic value of culinary or tabletop vessels is based on form and function located in their utility, craft, or aesthetics and not ritual power. Customarily we critique their beauty and functionality, not their role as visual/cultural texts. This talk interrogates the semiotics of material cultural artifacts imbued in several 19th century English and Low Country vessels created by makers such as Josiah Wedgwood, Enoch Wood, and enslaved David Drake, that have a tacit racialized agency, linguistic messaging, or symbolic signs above and beyond their utilitarian functionality. Consider that a “sign” is something that stands for something else, just as seeing smoke alerts us that fire is or was present. The creation of “transferware” fostered the production and circulation of affordable ceramics sometimes enhanced with texts. Unpacking this explicit messaging included in everyday culinary material objects may refer to both explicit/implicit paradigms in need of alteration or evisceration.
Length: 30 minutes