2024 Theses Doctoral

Cultivating the Future: Heritage, Identity, and the Revival of Coffee Production in Martinique

James, Alyssa Adina Lori

𝐶𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐹𝑢𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 offers an ethnographic analysis of the project to revive 𝐴𝑟𝑎𝑏𝑖𝑐𝑎 𝑡𝑦𝑝𝑖𝑐𝑎 coffee production in Martinique, originally introduced during the colonial period. The heritage initiative aims to use Martinique’s coffee history as a narrative touchstone, connecting the island’s natural and cultural heritage with sustainable economic development. By examining how the project seeks to shape a transformed future from an unresolved colonial past, this dissertation argues that the romanticization of agricultural heritage can obscure contemporary challenges, such as climate change, and hinder imaginative and practical future planning.

The dissertation explores various orientations toward the future that are cultivated within the coffee revival project, including expectation and promise, possibility and hope, anticipation and speculation. Interludes woven through the text highlight the interconnectedness of the environment and the experience of becoming and being Black. These interludes lead to the concluding epilogue that introduces the conceptual methodology of attending to Black Atlantic Elements—it foregrounds fluidity and relationality among various cultural, ecological, and social elements, a counterpoint to the essentializing tendencies of Western ontological paradigms.

The research utilizes a multi-methodological approach, including ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and qualitative interviews, complemented by critical textual analysis. Over ten months of fieldwork in Martinique, interactions with coffee farmers, Island Parks Service officials, local residents, and other collaborators provided firsthand insights into the coffee revival project. Archival research conducted in both France and Martinique supplied historical context on the introduction and decline of coffee production on the island. The study also draws on contemporary scientific, journalistic, and policy texts to understand how these narratives are currently used to shape both local and global perceptions of Martinican coffee.

Overall, this dissertation takes heritage seriously to understand the people and places that mobilize it, focusing on the histories they choose to bequeath and their visions of the future. The findings highlight the complex temporality involved in bringing material pasts into the present to shape future visions. This vexation of time troubles not only this ethnography and its interlocutors but also the Caribbean as a whole, where theories of Caribbean temporality often explore how futures are shaped and constrained by the past and its afterlives. Through critical attention to the parallel temporalities and future orientations within Martinique’s coffee revival project, this work reveals how interpretations of the past and present are shaped by the ends pursued.