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How might liberal notions of universal freedom and individual personhood enable and depend upon land theft, forced labor, resource extraction, and hierarchical systems of racism and civilization? I will suggest that sugar offers an answer to this question. Sugar might seem simple or irrelevant: it is a delicious treat, available anytime, that satisfies the tastes of peoples across the world. It is a source of immediate pleasure, delightful to children and adults alike. Yet this history and production of sugar also reveals a theory of freedom. If theories of modern freedom are often told through a story of the progressive history of a universal political ideal, what would it mean to reread that story through the history of sugar, which is tied to centuries of brutality, dispossession, and racism? Sugar, I argue, makes palpable, and palatable, the interconnections between individual personhood, rule of law, and private property with settler colonialism, enslavement, resource extraction, and corporate consolidation. Sugar offers a both a theory of freedom and a gustatory archive of freedom's violent practices. Lisa Lowe's work expands what counts as an archive of freedom, and opens the possibility of connecting sugar and freedom. Lowe develops a story of liberalism and the modern freedom it constructs—which includes liberty as individual self-possession and rationality, emancipation as release from state tyranny, and economic freedom as free labor and free trade—into a material, aesthetic and global history. The story of liberal modernity is global on Lowe's telling, not Euro-American, and encompasses at once European wealth and practices of self-rule with African slavery, North and South American dispossession, and Asian labor and imperial governance, what she calls \"the intimacies of four continents.\" For Lowe, certain tactile and aesthetic objects can offer a more encompassing history of liberal freedom than standard readings of political theoretical texts or European archives because their very material incorporates the peoples, labor, and resources from across the globe. Lowe's method thus expands how scholars can come to perceive histories and theories of freedom—by studying material objects and sensations that hold together a transcontinental story. In this global yet intimate history, one developed from various objects, literatures, and state archives, as well as Africana, anticolonial, feminist, and subaltern studies, legal emancipation does not necessarily grant freedom, universal personhood only acknowledges a small segment of the world population as universal, and practices of liberal freedom can legitimate Indigenous dispossession and racialized enslavement. This transcontinental history of liberalism and freedom is known but \"unthought\" in popular US political discourses; it is familiar yet strange, and globally interconnected. One such material and aesthetic object that reveals this global intimacy, for Lowe, is Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons' multimedia artwork \"Sugar/Bittersweet.\" \"Sugar/Bittersweet\" examines the history of the sugar industry in Cuba. It symbolizes a sugar cane field using African spears as cane, referring both to the geographical origins of sugarcane laborers and to the violence enacted on them by enslaving settlers. Chinese weights symbolize the measuring of harvest, signifying the indentured laborers brought to Cuba from Asia after emancipation to mediate between freed blacks and white landowners. Chinese and African wooden stools center the cane, and refer to the transcontinental intermixing of peoples in the cane fields. Raw sugar confections of varying levels of refinement are stacked and pierced by the spears, symbolizing the inseparability of sweetness and violence as well as the global upheavals that enabled sugar cane production to dominate Cuba. \"Sugar/Bittersweet\" amalgamates the racial hierarchies of colonial plantation labor with intercontinental trade routes and the pleasurable confections that have generated so much European and later American wealth; as Alejandro de la Fuente's curatorial notes to the artwork describe, \"they perform a fractured, sweaty Cuba built on lashes, blood, sexual violence, and the unbearable stench of slave ships.\" In an interview, Campos-Pons explains that she used sugar in different stages of refinement to symbolize the different peoples involved in its trade, as the value of different colors of sugar historically maps on to racial hierarchies; white sugar is pure, prized, and will fetch the highest price. Brown sugar, unrefined and full of impurities, is made by and for the poor. \"Sugar,\" envisioned in this artwork and elaborated by Lowe, is a worldwide commercial object produced at a one level by industrious and self-possessed land owners for a global marketplace, and produced at another level by the global workings of Afro-Cuban slave labor, Chinese indentured labor, and Indigenous land theft, to eventually become a freely-circulating commodity. In this sense, \"Sugar/Bittersweet\" is a meditation both on Cuban sugar and on the broader transcontinental shifts of labor, people, and industries that make up one circuit of what we now call liberal modernity. This story told in \"Sugar/Bittersweet\" is, I argue, also a story of freedom, though it may not appear so at first. Yet the artwork might just as accurately be titled \"Liberty\" as \"Sugar/Bittersweet,\" so intertwined and co-constitutive are their historical trajectories. The sugar industry in the Caribbean, especially in the British colonies, was enabled by discourses and practices of freedom. These discourses include: 1) British settlers' pursuit of self-sufficiency and independence through landowning and economic prosperity; 2) sovereign claims for European territorial acquisition, for dominion over conquered land; 3) individual freedom to acquire private property through agricultural enclosure, and to declare war on adversaries in spaces without a European sovereign government; 4) the capacity to spread freedom by imposing civilizational norms on peoples who do not (yet) value private property and individuality; 5) the freedom to control and master nature, to view nature as a site for resource extraction; and 6) the freedom of personal authority over one's property—including enslaved people. In this sense, the sugar plantation is both a scene of brutal domination and an outgrowth of particular practices of freedom enacted by the people who controlled plantations. Freedom shifts in relation to the sugar plantation; it becomes not only a European-originated political ideal of the abstract individual protected from and by state power, but also a central part of global projects of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism. If freedom is, in its liberal political-theoretical form, the practice of self-willed action for civilized individuals who want to escape the heavy hand of state tyranny to live, trade, and achieve economic prosperity without experiencing domination by others, then on the slave plantation this practice produces the exploitation and domination of those whose bodies and actions do not qualify for freedom, in part because they are forced into providing the material sustenance for those who do.8 \"Sugar/Bittersweet\" as a story of freedom shows that freedom is not simplistically a ruse to conceal enslavement, however, but more complexly it suggests that practices of modern freedom include enslavement and dispossession. Indeed, de la Fuente's commentary for the exhibit is titled \"On Sugar, Slavery, and the Pursuit of (Cuban) Happiness,\" offering a biting inverse of both John Locke's and the Declaration of Independence's story of emancipation from tyranny. It suggests that freedom's exercise produces, alongside practices of ending state tyranny, the bitter scene of Cuban sugar production. \"Sugar/Bittersweet\" tells a story of liberal freedom written by the losers. \"Sugar\" is a material sediment of liberal freedom. I am referring to sugar both ways: both Campos-Pons' artwork, and the familiar refined white granules consumed in some form around the globe every day today. The forms of suffering, exploitations of labor, and intercontinental affinities that Campos-Pons' art examines are condensed in historical and current modes of sugar production, in iterations of freedom like property acquisition and self-mastery, in the aftereffects of colonialism now called development, and in the economic circulation of commodities and labor now called neoliberalism. Sugar offers one part of a global record of the history of freedom; freedom's practices include the activities of the sugar slave plantation. This is not to say that the plantation is the only form that freedom takes, or that sugar production is the only form of freedom's practice, but it is to say that a focus on the history of sugar offers insight into the ugliness of freedom's practices within and below the story of progressive inclusion into dominant iterations of liberty, including individual choice, self-possession, rule of law, and private property. The sugar plantation, which generated the origins of racial slavery, shows how slavery is not merely the opposite of freedom, but is contiguous with and connected to freedom in the same system of plantation power: part of the same overarching system in which mastery, dominion, and possession are key attributes of freedom. The history of sugar offers a different story of freedom's practice. It is a story that can be tasted and smelled. In the rest of this essay, I examine sugar as containing a history and theory of freedom, intertwining select moments and locations in the history of sugar with early political theories of liberal freedom, focusing on John Locke, to see how sugar takes root in early modern freedom. In so doing I suggest that the location for studying early developments of liberal freedom should include not only England and Northern American colonies but also Barbados, the W

Hillary Clinton's memoir of the 2016 election and her life in politics, What Happened, is an affective rollercoaster. Wrath, frustration, regret, and sorrow, among other intensified emotions, saturate the book's pages. This range of affect is surprising for a political autobiography. Books in this genre typically present their subject-selves as stalwart and emotionally controlled actors whose range of feeling is limited to the proper amount of righteous irritation or vague empathy necessary to justify a policy proposal. None has the rawness of Clinton's book, a rawness that is, I would argue, made possible by her gender. This is one of the few vectors of political expression that is expanded, not contracted, for Clinton in her role as the first woman to become a major-party presidential candidate.