ABSTRACT

A chapter dedicated exclusively to sugar and the ocean seemed called for by this book’s specifi c conceptual design, and by the roles these bodies play as material objects and as internal organic principles throughout the book. The following rationale accounts for both the chapter’s sequential positioning and for the conceptual and demonstrated capacities of sugar and the ocean to produce the imaginary. Placed here before the next four core chapters, this one inscribes a complex trope of priority. It respects the precedence sugar and the ocean occupy in crosscultural myths of origin. That mythic relationship argues a grounding of the symbolic meanings associated with these two entities deep in the archaic biology of humankind.