Duple Cacao-Chocolate and the Materiality of the Political Economy of Pleasure

Abstract

This article expands on Walter Rodney’s call to explore possibilities for redevelopment of the African diaspora due to its underdevelopment. Drawing on four experiences of rural everyday resistance in Colombia, Brazil, and Venezuela, it analyses fine-flavour cocoa (Theobroma cacao l.) ecologies, subjectivities, and economics in relation to craft chocolate production, commercialisation, and consumption. Our evidence suggests that farmers’ liberation projects occur beyond the ambivalence between oppression and emancipation. It is argued that emancipations are rather shaped by complex non-binary power dynamics with multiple tensions that resist the materiality of a racialised administration of pleasure and pain.