Jacob Myers, “Keeping the Rat-Book: Marly and Visceral Histories of Jamaican Agriculture.”(Early American Literature, Volume 60, Number 1, 2025, pp. 21-41)
This article brilliantly explores what rats and rat-cuisine reveal about agricultural practices, discourses of slavery, and racial tensions in colonial Jamaica. Myers’s contribution is a methodological tour de force in the way it “explores ‘human-animal-plant configurations that challenges the hierarchies separating the lives of estate owners, overseers, and the enslaved.’” Attending to “food’s viscerality,” as Myers proposes and demonstrates in this article, reveals how conflicting politics and colonial ideologies fared when confronting the natural environment and human interactions with it, including as food. The Committee appreciated its archival inventiveness in juxtaposing a white creole novel alongside a Black creole prayer, using the ubiquitous plantation rats as a point of connection.