School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Centre of African Studies, in collaboration with History Research Seminars, is delighted to invite you to the following book launch:

"Race: Taste and the Grape: Forces that Shaped the South African Wine Industry"

Speaker: Professor Paul Nugent, Professor of Comparative African History, UoE

Chair: Dr Wayne Dooling, Senior Lecturer in the History of Southern Africa, SOAS

With the introduction of wine to the Cape Colony, it quickly became associated locally with social extremes: with the material trappings of privilege and taste, on the one side, and the stark realities of human bondage, on the other. The ways in which farm work was racialised is quite well-known. What has been less well-documented is the ways in which consumption was also racialised. The passage of the 1928 Liquor Act of 1928 created racial prohibition and exacerbated the underlying problem of overproduction/underconsumption. This, in turn, summoned forth elaborate systems of regulation that fed the vicious circle of too much cheap wine chasing too few (and mostly poor) consumers. This seminar addresses these key themes in the book, Race, Taste and Grape (CUP, 2024), and reveals how past configurations continue to cast a long shadow over the present, despite the reinvention of Cape wine at many levels.

When: Wednesday 2nd October 2024 (3:30-5pm BST)

Where: G.07 Meadows Lecture Theatre - Doorway 4 (Medical School, Teviot) 

Format: In-person only

Speaker Biography:

Paul Nugent is Professor of Comparative African History straddling the Department of History and the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently leading a British Academy project on wine as living heritage in the context of climate change in South Africa. The book project for Race, Taste and the Grape arose out of a Leverhulme Fellowship and subsequent archival research and interviews carried out across the Western Cape. Much of it was drafted during periods as a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study (StiAS). Aside from wine, Paul continues to work on different aspects of African borders and chairs the African Borderlands Research Network (ABORNE).