Human predilection for sweetness is an innate, universal biological trait as much as a cultivated and personalized taste. One conspicuous paradox of modern sweetness is that it is rarely tasted without a shadow, be it the sedimented history of sugar plantation slavery and colonial extraction, as criticized by Sidney Mintz's seminal work, or the cautionary tales of refined sugar in contemporary wellness culture. This seminar revisits the human taste of sweetness from the shadows and asks how sweetness bears witness to historical and personal traumas: how violence settles into taste, smell, texture, and atmosphere, and how sweetness saturates the traumatized body and the spaces it moves through.

Some catastrophes like war, famine, and expulsion are punctual while others are attritional, such as the slow violence of industrialization and the slow unmaking of the worlds it has built. In the aftermath of both, sweet things circulate with peculiar intensity: street food hawked by the newly dispossessed, confections that soothe the children of catastrophe, or sugar crops that once staved off starvation and now signify heritage. Here a productive friction emerges. Trauma theory has privileged experience that was never fully lived; phenomenology begins from lived experience itself. We take this tension as the seminar's engine. Can the senses register what consciousness could not? Can a smellscape hold a memory the subject never formed? When does sweetness console, and when does it anesthetize? Recent work in sensory anthropology and geography offers a vocabulary for this inquiry: the synesthesia of food experience, in which flavor fuses with sound, season, and setting to become a vehicle of memory; the foodscapes and smellscapes through which sweet things organize streets, neighborhoods, and territories; the haptic and gustatory registers of cinema and media.

Sweetness is also a barometer of social transformation. How people sweeten their food, who produces and consumes sweets, which sweets are rationed, taxed, heritagized, or renounced: each registers structural changes at the scale of the palate. We therefore treat sweet things not only as objects of memory but as instruments of diagnosis, and we invite papers from any geographic, linguistic, or historical context, welcoming work on literature, film, foodways, visual culture, and popular media, including sensory-ethnographic and practice-based approaches alongside literary and cinematic analysis.

Topics include, but are not limited to: synesthetic memory in diasporic and exilic writing; smellscapes of street vending and their regulation; famine foods and their afterlives; haptic visuality and culinary cinema; comfort food and cruel optimism; rationing, austerity, and the first sweet after scarcity; socialist and postsocialist confections; sugar taxes and the moralization of taste; sensory heritage and nostalgia economies; sugar, race, and empire; the gendered labor of sweetness.