A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labour, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador.

The Latin American Studies program is proud to support two book seminars - aimed mainly at graduate students and interested public - to discuss the recent publication of A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labour and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador, by professor Chris Krupa (Anthropology, UTSC).

The first seminar will focus on Finance and Historicity, will be hosted on Friday, January 26, 2024 from 12:00 to 1:30 PM in AP 246 (Anthropology Boardroom) with discussants:

• Gloria Pérez-Rivera (Mount Royal University) and
• George Mantzios (University of Toronto)

The second seminar will focus on Interiority and Labor, to be hosted on Friday, February 23, 2024 from 12:00 to 1:30 PM at the JHB 318, with discussants:

• Elspeth Brown (UTM) and
• Sumayya Kassamali (University of Toronto)

To register, please visit the Google Forms registration page.

About the Book

When Ecuador's cut-flower industry took off in the mid-1980s, it rode a wave of international credit peddling and currency speculation that would lead countries of the Global South into successive debt crises and northern financial firms to fortune and dominion. By the start of the twenty-first century, as the Ecuadorian economy collapsed and its ties with international finance became strained, flower exporters rebuilt their businesses around the profitability of their indigenous labor force, drawing local communities deeply into new plantation systems taking over the highlands.

In A Feast of Flowers, Christopher Krupa goes inside Ecuador's booming cut-flower industry to chronicle the ways its capitalist pioneers built a booming export industry around a racial ideology, turning indigenous people's purported differences into resources for industrial expansion. At the core of this racial system is a belief, central to postcolonial science and politics in Ecuador, in capitalism's unique capacity to change people's racial identity and to liberate oppressed populations from racial subordination. Krupa shows how such views not only guide how indigenous people are today incorporated into demanding labor systems in Ecuador's new export plantations, but also how indigenous minds and bodies became sites of study and intervention by scientists, politicians, and economic planners throughout the last century, all looking to change indigenous people in some way.

Combining nearly two decades of ethnographic and historical research, A Feast of Flowers shows how aggressive capitalist expansion in postcolonial contexts may revive longstanding intersections between race and economy to facilitate new modes of dispossession under the guise of humanitarian intervention.

- from the publisher. To learn more, including where to purchase, visit the University of Pennsylvania Press website.