In class we saw Antonioni’s Blow-Up in connection with the Devil’s spit (ask if you must, and I’ll link when I can). It was quite exotic as all the students were born after this film was made. I was a child.
The true class to give would be on sugar as a social actor. Sweetness and power, brown sugar, monoculture and patriarchy. There is ample bibliography for this, and Fernando Coronil has a book on oil and the state.
The class on sugar would be preceded by a radio advertisement whose musical lead in would be by the Archies. I think we should all give courses on oil, coffee, silver, tobacco and sugar, and share ideas. Cinnamon, chocolate, and hashish are more romantic, of course, but are they as interesting?
What other inanimate objects and products have emerged as social actors, and how have they been represented in song and story? When, and to what extent, is music a social actor? Why, and/or why not?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Isn’t there a book on salt? And one, maybe by the same guy, on gunpowder?
Yes, and I wonder if anyone has done rubber. The thing about sugar is that it is so celebrated in song and story, but I think we should give lit – cultural studies – area studies courses on all products that end up functioning as social actors, it will be enlightening!
Paul Freedman has a relatively new book out about spices, which would have to be a contendor. I would offer two quite big ones: communion bread, and gold. Oil too of course, but not in the period I know best.
Communion bread! I would not have thought of this! Do tell!
Barbed wire would be interesting, as would coal and silver. The only example of any of those in “story” that I have is coal (or more specifically a coal mine) in El Chiflón del Diablo.
On coal, there’s also _How Green Was My Valley_, and _Working in a Coal Mine_: http://youtu.be/VkOZnsTZYwQ
And now I have found this interesting site.
http://arlindo-correia.com/120403.html
There have, it would seem, been at least two books written about barbed wire. I seem to recall it being specifically mentioned in “Night,” though I might be off about that.
When I suggested communion bread, I was thinking of a particular bit of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. we are in about 616, and Essex’s first Christian king has just died, whereafter:
But of course a better instance of it to hang huge importance off would probably be the place of the debate on transsubstantiation in the sixteenth-century wars of religion. The birth of Protestantism was not an easy one, and whether that bread was or was not bread was one of the, er, well, seeds of it.
Sorry, poor citation: the Bede text is here, cap. V.
So, those Catholic / Protestant wars, they are about the bread itself and transsubstantiation … does communion bread take on a life of its own? Topic of debate that causes all sorts of activity, or does the er, substance itself (if it is one, the bread) also act? 😉
Because this is the idea one gets from Ortiz on sugar: because it controls whole economies and works its way into so many aspects of life, because the conditions in which it is produced give rise to a particular form of culture (plantations, patriarchy, mestizaje), it acts and creates as well as signifies. There are lots of products whose advent created great changes and which have symbolic power (e.g. barbed wire) but something like oil, which has at least as much primordial power as sugar, isn’t in song and story as much … or is it?
I mean, you could totally go to town studying literature on and from sugar cultures, and people have written books on said literature … but has this been done for oil? … perhaps it has more for barbed wire … ?
I have not figured it out because I don’t know enough about all of these things.