Keyser 403

f
CANDY BOYS AND CHOCOLATE

FACTORIES: ROALD DAHL,

RACIALIZATION, AND GLOBAL

INDUSTRY

Catherine Keyser

In her 2014 installation at the Domino Sugar Factory, A Subtlety,

or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, Kara Walker constructed five-foot-tall
statues of boys modeled on racist tchotchkes. Carrying baskets and
toting bundles, these boys surrounded a sugarcoated sphinx. Walker
subtitled it "an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who
have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens
of the New World." Five of the fifteen boys were made entirely of
candy; the construction team poured heated sugar, water, and corn
syrup into silicone molds. These statues proved both fragile and
prone to melting, so the remaining ten were built with polyester
resin and coated in molasses or sugar (Sokol). NPR correspondent
Audie Cornish observed: "The boys are cute and apple-cheeked, but
they're also kind of scary—some of the melted candy looks a lot like
blood." Through these broken, melting boys, Walker connected the
epistemological violence of racial stereotyping and the ecological,
economic, and physical violence of global industry. This site-specific,
temporally limited installation—exhibited in the weeks leading up to
the demolition of the Brooklyn plant in August 2014 to make way
for real-estate development—insisted on a continuum between the
colonial past and the corporate present in the form of broken black

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 63, number 3, Fall 2017. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
404 Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry
bodies that are either erased in the name of progress or overwritten
with the cuteness of a commodity.
I begin my consideration of Roald Dahl's famous novel Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory with Walker's installation because both
artists dramatize the violence carried out on the child's body in the
name of the global economy of sweetness. The fact that they do so
by citing stereotypes and mobilizing humorous grotesques might
cause us to miss the political implications of this focus on the body.
Dahl's sadistic aesthetic has been variously noted, reviled, and cel-
ebrated (as, for that matter, has Walker's). Walker signifies on the
sugar factory as a node in hemispheric and global imperialism and
makes the cuteness of these laborers impossible to stomach. By
contrast, Dahl seems to enshrine in his timeless utopia and cheer-
ful, diminutive Oompa-Loompas precisely the racist mythology that
Walker's installation breaks down. Walker pursued the implications
of this violence, bringing it with nauseating power to her audience's
nostrils as her sculptures' molasses coating ran and rotted. Dahl
allures his readers with a candy land filled with visual and olfactory
delights. An early draft of Dahl's novel, however, entitled "Charlie's
Chocolate Boy," uses the trope of the chocolate mold to dramatize
the violence that results from the superimposition of stereotype on
a living subject. In this draft, Charlie Bucket is a "NEGRO boy" who
crawls inside a chocolate mold and becomes trapped there (7).1 He
is scalded and almost drowned by molten chocolate. While from the
outside Charlie "thought the chocolate boys were marvelous" (56),
from the inside the chocolate is "like a warm sticky glove that had
been pulled tightly over his body, clinging to every single part of
him" (60). In this draft, Dahl registers that the commodification of
black bodies and of tropical ingredients renders racialized children
profoundly vulnerable.
While biographers and commentators note the existence of this
early draft, literary critics have yet to address its depiction of racial-
ization and violence within the chocolate factory and to incorporate
its claustrophobic, even melancholic tone into their understanding
of the resulting (and significantly more ebullient) novel.2 "Charlie's
Chocolate Boy" reveals that even an apparently racist text—as many
commentators have persuasively concluded of Charlie and the Choco-
late Factory—can reveal, in its very attempts to justify global capital-
ism and racial hierarchy, the nightmare underbelly of racialization.
Furthermore, Dahl's investment in literature for children makes him
particularly attuned to the vulnerability of those bodies even when
he seems to be championing their resilience. In "Charlie's Chocolate
Boy," Dahl draws attention to the fact that pain fills the gap between
subject and stereotype. When Charlie lies "as still as a statue inside
 Keyser 405
his thick hard suit of chocolate," his suffering is both visceral and
existential: "after the dark horrors of that box . . . to Charlie Bucket,
it seemed as though he had literally come back to life from the dead"
(62). Through one boy's imprisonment, Dahl metaphorically addresses
slavery as an ongoing historical injury undergirding both colonialism
and late capitalism.3 In the final version of the novel Dahl makes his
protagonist white and attempts to resolve historical timescales and
geographical ranges through the presentist utopia of the chocolate
factory, but even in this version racialized bodies thwart Dahl's at-
tempts at abstraction and carry the traces of early anxiety about the
human costs of globalized industry.
When Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in 1964,
the happy enslavement of the adorable Oompa-Loompas was a clearly
retrograde fantasy, as many commentators have observed.4 In this
edition, Oompa-Loompas "belong to a tribe of tiny miniature pygmies"
that Wonka "discovered" and "brought over from Africa [him]self,
the whole tribe of them, three thousand in all" (73). He "smuggled
them over in large packing cases with holes in them" (76), and the
factory's "great iron gates" are "locked and chained" (21). Through
this conscripted, imprisoned, and effectively wageless labor (they are
paid in cacao beans), Dahl superimposes imperial memories of the
slave trade onto the postwar British scene of increased Caribbean
and African immigration.5 The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed
decolonization and nationalization in Africa, the origin point of the
fictional Oompa-Loompas; race riots and diasporic black political activ-
ism in England, Dahl's homeland; and Black Power, civil disobedience,
and the Civil Rights movement in the United States, where the novel
was first published. In 1969 the NAACP sent a letter to the producer
of the film adaptation then in development, expressing dismay over
the racism and slavery in the book. Dahl agreed reluctantly to "dene-
gro" the Oompa-Loompas (Sturrock 494). In the 1971 movie, the
Oompa-Loompas have orange skin and green hair, and in the 1973
edition of the book, the version that continues to be reprinted, they
are aboriginal people from "Loompaland" (77) with "golden-brown
hair" and "rosy-white skin" (87).6 This did little, as Philip Nel argues,
to change the novel's underlying racial fantasy: "the new versions
instead more subtly encode the same racial and colonial messages
of the original versions."7 All three versions fetishize the Oompa-
Loompas' hair and skin. The Oompa-Loompas do not speak except
in choruses of song; they are animated and frequently erupt into
laughter, drumming, and dance.8
In both editions of the novel, the narrator observes that the
Oompa-Loompas are "no larger than medium-sized dolls" (76). This
metaphor justifies their labor by rendering them immune to pain and
406 Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry
subject to manipulation and control. As Robin Bernstein writes of the
pickaninny in late nineteenth-century advertising culture: "When
laminated to commodities, the pickaninny, as that-which-cannot-be-
hurt, masked the exploitative and even violent aspects of industrial-
ization" (54). Dahl identifies the Oompa-Loompas with the products
of mass production; they are interchangeable and thus replaceable.
Their duplicability erodes the impression of irreducible humanity. In
the 1964 edition, when the children first spy the Oompa-Loompas
and express disbelief at their numbers and size, Wonka counters
that "They are real people!" (73), revealing the dubious quality of
that classification through his very exclamation. Wonka goes on to
describe them as "miniature," a word—drawn from the Italian min-
iatura, for a mode of illustration—that suggests a reproduction or a
tiny likeness of something ("Miniature"). The Oompa-Loompas are
not only laborers in the factory; they are also facsimiles produced by
the factory. Indeed, Charlie erroneously supposes that "Mr. Wonka
has made them himself—out of chocolate!" (72).
At the turn of the century, advertising and commodity culture
granted a potent afterlife to the notion that the black body was a fun-
gible, manipulable, even edible object.9 This convention strengthened
rather than waned in the early decades of the twentieth century; in
fact, it continued well into the middle of the century, when figures
like Aunt Jemima became a focal point for critique and ironic reap-
propriation.10 Racist kitsch and commodity culture grew in tandem,
associating racialized bodies with affective pleasures and caricatur-
ing the black body in pain. As Bill Brown argues, the history of en-
slavement was thus made uncannily present within the era of mass
production: "even as we point to a certain moment in a certain place
when and where it is no longer possible for a person to be a slave
(to be someone else's property, to be . . . a thing), we nonetheless
find, in the post-history of that moment, residues of precisely that
possibility—in other words, an ongoing record of the ontological ef-
fects of slavery" (182).
This ontological residue can trigger an acknowledgement of
the political present through "historical ambiguity, the incapacity
to differentiate the present from the past, despite history, because,
despite change over time, there's been no change" (Brown 204),
thus resembling the kind of confrontation that Walker stages in A
Subtlety. Indeed, the irony of the persistent connection between the
modern chocolate industry and the supposedly defunct slave trade
was clear to others; as early as 1906, the British journalist Henry
Nevinson entitled his exposé of Portuguese cacao plantations that
supplied chocolate to Anglo-American chocolate companies A Modern
Slavery. Nonetheless, Dahl uses the sensuous surfaces of stereotype
 Keyser 407
to render servitude timeless and natural. In the 1964 edition of Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory, an Oompa-Loompa with "beautiful white
teeth," "skin . . . almost pure black," and a "fuzzy head" approaches
Wonka to do his bidding (83). This implicit justification of the co-
lonial relationship, even in the era of decolonization, draws on the
imperial iconography of chocolate advertisements through which, as
Catherine Hall argues, "the relations of the colonized are occluded,
the labour of black people transmuted into gifts in return for the
present of 'civilization'" (42). Turn-of-the-century chocolate adver-
tisements, Anandi Ramamurthy notes, depicted the "young African
boy . . . with 'sambo'-like characteristics of worker and entertainer,
easily contended in child-like happiness" (74). The Oompa-Loompas
resemble this stereotypic and affable figure.
Cuteness often functions to domesticate the operations of
capital and the web of relationships that it conceals, as Sianne Ngai
contends: "By returning us to a simpler, sensuous world of domestic
use and consumption, populated exclusively by children and their
intimate guardians, cuteness is the pastoral fantasy that, somehow,
the commodity's qualitative side as use-value, or as a product of
concrete, phenomenological labor, can be extracted and therefore
'rescued.' Yet this romantic fantasy requires force, a willfulness of
imagination arguably reflected in the physical distortions of cute form"
(Our Aesthetic, 66). Charlie and the Chocolate Factory dramatizes this
fantasy as five white children accompanied only by their "intimate
guardians" tour the chocolate factory, a verdant and mouth-watering
place peopled by cute pygmies who validate the consumer fantasy of
"concrete, phenomenological labor" as a labor of love. The fantasy
is interrupted, however, by the physical punishments endured by
the greedy children of Dahl's fable. These child consumers undergo
profound "physical distortions" that appear more horrific than cute
when inflicted on first-world bodies rather than Oompa-Loompas.
In the transformation of these child bodies, we see the rem-
nants of Dahl's claustrophobic account of racialization from "Charlie's
Chocolate Boy." For example, Violet Beauregard's "huge rubbery
lips" when she chews Wonka's experimental chewing gum recall the
racist iconography of the minstrel mouth, which in turn signals her
promiscuous ingestion (Charlie 107). Her resulting transformation
makes her "a terrible peculiar sight" (108–09): "the skin all over
her body, as well as her great big mop of curly hair, had turned a
brilliant, purplish-blue, the color of blueberry juice!" (109, emphasis
added).11 Her new subalternity and succulence link her embodied
experiences to the Oompa-Loompas, as Wonka confesses: "I've tried
it twenty times in the Testing Room on twenty Oompa-Loompas,
and every one of them finished up as a blueberry" (109). Horrified
408 Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry
by the new shape and color of his child, Mr. Beauregard laments: "I
don't want a blueberry for a daughter!" (109).12 Once white children
become colorful and edible, the racist trope becomes defamiliarized
and uncanny. When Augustus Gloop, his face "painted brown with
chocolate" (83), is sucked up the chocolate pipe, his mother fears:
"They'll be selling him by the pound all over the country tomorrow
morning!" (85). Through these children, Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory registers a disavowed connection between selling bodies and
selling fudge.

The Circulation of Chocolate: Within and Between

Bodies and Continents
Dahl's biography evidences that his own life was caught up in
overlapping capitalist and colonial networks. His Norwegian father
came to Wales to make his fortune providing coal to steamships.
Though he died when Dahl was very young, Dahl's father wanted
his son to attend an English boarding school because he thought the
"magic" of an English education must contain the roots of imperial
power (Boy 21). In 1938 and 1939 Dahl worked for the Shell Oil
Company in Dar Es Saleem, where he saw the vestiges of German
and English colonialism firsthand. Dahl subsequently trained to join
the Royal Air Force in Iraq, where he observed "every conceivable kind
of person—Arabs, Syrians, Jews, Negroes, Indians and the majority
who are just nothing at all, with faces the colour of milk chocolate"
(Sturrock 126, emphasis added).
Dahl's professional life and cultural perspective were also cru-
cially transatlantic. He lived in Washington, DC, from 1942 until 1946,
working for the British Embassy and later for the covert British Se-
curity Coordination. There he found his first publishing successes as
well as his longtime agent, and his stories appeared in the Saturday
Evening Post, the Ladies' Home Journal, and Collier's. In the early
1950s he lived in New York, where he met and married American
actress Patricia Neal; garnered a "first reading deal" with the New
Yorker (Sturrock 323); and impressed publisher Alfred A. Knopf.13
Knopf later published Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which proved
an "immediate success" in the United States (407). Dahl did not find
a UK publisher for the novel for almost seven more years.
Critics of the novel often focus on Dahl's Britishness rather than
acknowledging his intimate view of "the American century" (Luce
61).14 However, this narrative's emphasis on nationalism and imperial-
ism shortchanges the coimplication of corporate power and colonial
structures that can be traced in both Dahl's fiction and life writing.
 Keyser 409
For Dahl, chocolate companies were exciting in part because of their
global reach. In his memoir, Boy, Dahl reminisces about Cadbury,
which sent test candy bars to his boarding school, and his fantasy
that "[Mr. Cadbury] would slap me on the back and shout, 'We'll sell
it by the million! We'll sweep the world with this one! How on earth
did you do it? Your salary is doubled!'" (149). In his history of the
chocolate industry, which traces the invention of the chocolate bar in
1876 through the rise of "the great classic chocolates" in the 1930s,
Dahl connects England and the United States through the story of
the Mars confectionery company, a transatlantic family business
(Roald 152). The father developed the Milky Way bar in Chicago and
then financed his son's business in Slough, England, which in turn
produced the best-selling Mars bar. Thus, in laudatory rather than
skeptical tones, Dahl treats England and America as interdependent
corporate powers, a connection crucial to the placeless imaginary of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.15
Companies like Cadbury and Hershey created a marketing my-
thology that made chocolate production continuous with regional and
national identity.16 They achieved this in part through their planned
industrial communities, Bournville and Hershey. These towns con-
structed around chocolate factories, much like the town in Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory, attempted to seamlessly integrate pas-
toralism and technology through industrial spectacle (Outka 34).
Postcards displayed the cleanliness and organization of these settle-
ments through the portrayal of Tudor architecture, pastoral views,
and pristine factories.17 Their advertising featured both visual and
metaphorical whiteness in their praise of local dairy industry and
its milk's purity (Hall 39). As philanthropic projects these planned
communities as well as Hershey's industrial school for orphan boys
proposed the protection of the white worker, who was vulnerable in
urban spaces and susceptible to demon drink.18 Cadbury and Hershey
also featured beatific white children as consumers in their advertis-
ing campaigns. Advertisements depicting well-dressed children and
solicitous mothers reinforced the association of this tropical ingredient
with bourgeois domesticity.19
A 1908 editorial in the Standard complained that while "in
[Cadbury's] model village and factories of Bournville the welfare
of the work-people is studied as closely as the quality of the goods
manufactured," the company ignored its dependence on and exploi-
tation of African labor:

The white hands of the Bournville chocolate makers are

helped by other unseen hands some thousands of miles
away, black and brown hands, toiling in plantations, or
410 Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry
hauling loads through swamp and forest. In the plenitude
of his solicitude for his fellow-creatures Mr. Cadbury might
have been expected to take some interest in the owners
of those same grimed African hands, whose toil also is
so essential to the beneficent and lucrative operations of
Bournville. (qtd. in Satre 227)

The editorial tropes on white purity and black pollution—"grimed Afri-

can hands"—to imply that the dirty hands in this arrangement actually
belong to Cadbury. This insistently physical synecdoche, however,
figures forth the interracial intimacies both evoked and mystified by
the global circuit of commodity production. Cadbury advertisements
managed these metaphorically miscegenating practices by pictur-
ing white and black children, connected by chocolate consumption
but hierarchized by difference: "There is no doubt that the African
boy is a worker serving the European girl who is part of the leisured
class" (Ramamurthy 72). On the other side of the Atlantic, Hershey
used its trademark, the so-called Cocoa Bean Baby, to naturalize the
white child's place at the center of the industry: a cocoa bean opens
to reveal a cherubic blond infant. The trademark, designed in 1898,
did not fall out of use until 1969 ("Cocoa").
As these advertising strategies convey, tropical resource ex-
traction fostered an intimate if disavowed relationship between the
white Anglo-American consumer, the global South, and blackness,
understood both as racialized laborers and as tropical raw materials,
which commodity culture tended to collapse into one another. Dahl
was keenly aware of these global exchanges and the intimacies they
produced. In Dahl's 1979 erotic novel for adults, My Uncle Oswald,
an entrepreneur learns from a British major formerly stationed in the
Sudan about a black beetle that, once crushed, serves as a powerful
aphrodisiac and potency drug. This entrepreneur—the Oswald of the
title—decides to find this beetle for himself, mass-produce its powder
in pill form, and coat it with chocolate. In this fable, black vitality both
reinvigorates and preserves white genius: Oswald and his seductive
accomplice Yasmin administer the pills to European modernists from
Joyce to Stravinsky and retain samples of their semen. The novel
both reaffirms a racist view of black sexuality and also concedes,
in however bizarre or backhanded a way, the centrality of the black
Atlantic to European industry and culture.
Dahl uses queer eroticism and racial masquerade to trope on
this intimacy. In order to trick Proust into having sex with her, Yasmin
"strap[s] the banana to the inside of her upper thigh with sticking
plaster . . . [leaving] a telltale and tantalizing bulge in exactly the
right place" (My Uncle 171). Yasmin's banana recalls the iconography
 Keyser 411
of Josephine Baker's famous banana skirt and unsettles the essential-
ism of white masculine power: "'This banana's a bit uncomfortable,'
she said. 'Now you know what it's like to be a man,' I said" (172).
The combination of phallic prostheticism and racial contamination
comes up again in Dahl's memoir, in which he writes about a school
friend who feared that eating licorice would turn him into a black
rat: "a short stumpy tail grows out of your back just above your
bottom. There is no cure for ratitis" (31). In these narratives, Dahl
voices the provocation—indeed, the titillation—and the anxiety that
the encounter between the global North and the global South in the
modern food industry will change the body of the white consumer.
Thus we have two fantasies of the modern chocolate industry.
One, promulgated by Anglo-American chocolate companies, insisted
on a local and national geography that preserved whiteness through
the purity of its product and the pastoralism of its factories. The other,
imagined in comical and even carnivalesque style by Dahl, drama-
tized the intimacies of unlikely bodies through the new circulation of
tropical and racialized raw materials, now produced and packaged
by companies in the global North. Wonka's factory in Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory counterposes these two geographies of the mod-
ern food industry. The "lovely valley" and "green meadows" inside
Wonka's factory recall the temperate, rural landscapes of England
and Pennsylvania (72). The factory combines pastoral and industrial
spectacle: "Below the waterfall (and this was the most astonishing
sight of all), a whole mass of enormous glass pipes were dangling
down into the river from somewhere high up in the ceiling" (73).
The size and transparency of the pipes bespeak the factory's power
and organization, its "astonishing" management of unruly resources
(including a crashing waterfall and a chocolate river). It organizes
raw materials, racialized bodies, and natural space, thus translating
imperial logics into corporate enterprises.20
The second geography, the tropical one, takes shape in the
"great brown river" of chocolate that recalls Amazonian and African
conquest (72). Rob Nixon argues that postcolonial texts often register
the contrast between pastoral and colonial terrains and rupture the
picturesque fantasy with the recollection of exploitation (245–46).
Just as Wonka encourages his guests to swallow the pastoral fanta-
sy—"'Try a buttercup!' cried Mr. Wonka. 'They're even nicer!'"—the
Oompa-Loompas arrive:

Suddenly, the air was filled with screams of excite-

ment.. . . [Veruca Salt] was pointing frantically to the other
side of the river. 'Look! Look over there!' she screamed. 'What
is it? He's moving! He's walking! It's a little person! . . .'
Everybody stopped picking buttercups and stared
across the river. (Charlie 75)
412 Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry
Once Veruca spots the people on "the other side of the river," Wonka
must account for their origins as well as the chocolate's. Later Veruca
spots a sign for "COWS THAT GIVE CHOCOLATE MILK," and Wonka
avows that they are "pretty little cows" but moves quickly past the
room in question (116).21 The cows that give chocolate milk embody
the pastoral fantasy in Cadbury advertisements that praise the pu-
rity of English meadows and overlook African cacao plantations. At
the turn of the century, Cadbury came under fire for buying their
cacao from plantations that used slave labor. In a 1908 editorial,
the Standard pointed out that while Cadbury celebrated its English
operations, "unseen hands some thousands of miles away, black and
brown hands, [were] toiling in plantations, or hauling loads through
swamps and forests."22 Eager to witness the factory's operations with
her own eyes, Veruca insists that she would like to see a chocolate
cow herself: "But why can't we see them? . . . Why do we have to go
rushing on past all these lovely rooms?" (116). Her comment con-
denses the appeal of the pastoral marketing strategy—lovely cows
and creamy chocolate—and her nascent suspicion of the supply chain:
surely there aren't chocolate cows behind that door? The pastoral and
the picturesque provide an insufficient account of the world beyond
the chocolate factory walls, and the children perceive that deficit.
If the chocolate factory cannot maintain a divide between ex-
terior and interior, tropical South and industrial North, or colonial
exploitation and technological innovation, then the white consumer
body is an even more charged circuit of exchange. With no chocolate
to eat, Charlie's whiteness is preserved, but it is a token of deadly
starvation: "His face became frighteningly white and pinched" (47).
Wonka's chocolate reanimates his body and reconnects him to plea-
sure: "as the rich warm creamy chocolate ran down his throat into
his empty tummy, his whole body from head to toe began to tingle
with pleasure, and a feeling of intense happiness spread over him"
(93). If pleasure comes in the form of the chocolate and the brown,
what does that mean for the pure white body projected by modern
Anglo-American chocolate companies? The answer to this problem
offered by industry and advertising was a simple one: white people
could consume blackness without becoming it, extracting the tropical
and containing it within the industrial. As bell hooks would write in
"Eating the Other," "The commodification of Otherness has been so
successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more
satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity
culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull
dish that is mainstream white culture" (21). Though Charlie enjoys
the chocolate, because he is white—and not, for example, a cacao-
craving Oompa-Loompa—he can mature from boyhood and economic
 Keyser 413
dependency into adulthood and economic power. Charlie begins the
novel unable to buy chocolate and ends the novel as Wonka's heir.
This happy ending requires that Charlie adopt Wonka's imperial
vantage point. Charlie surveys the countryside that he will inherit
from the dizzying height of Wonka's Great Glass Elevator:

It stopped and hung in mid-air, hovering like a helicopter,

hovering over the factory and over the very town itself
which lay spread out below them like a picture postcard!
Looking down through the glass floor on which he was
standing, Charlie could see the small far-away houses and
the streets and the snow that lay thickly over everything.
It was an eerie and frightening feeling to be standing on
clear glass high up in the sky. It made you feel that you
weren't standing on anything at all. (158)

The passage begins with a touristic vision of the factory and the sur-
rounding town as a "picture postcard." This place is both aesthetically
pleasing and spatially organized. Like the imperial homeland, the
industrial village plays an ideological role, supporting the corpora-
tion's global expansion. Real chocolate companies embraced this
colonizing enterprise; Hershey, for example, created a "model town"
in Cuba called Central Hershey, featuring "athletic fields," "palm-lined
avenue[s]," and "verdant parks" (Elmore 76). The picture-postcard
appeal of factory and town justifies the corporate mobility and even
militarism signaled by the Great Glass Elevator, "hovering like a he-
licopter." Unexpectedly, however, Charlie does not enjoy the view:
"It was an eerie and frightening feeling." Charlie looks down on his
erstwhile home, and it becomes foreign to him. Here the imperial
position is uncanny rather than triumphant.
In this moment of disorientation Charlie becomes aware of the
vehicle of his ascent, the Great Glass Elevator. "Standing on clear
glass high up in the sky" is "eerie and frightening" in part because
the intersection of whiteness and power that is supposed to be invis-
ible has become visible. As Richard Dyer argues: "The claim to racial
superiority resides in that which cannot be seen, the spirit, manifest
only in its control over the body and its enterprising exercise in the
world. Moreover, the ultimate position of power in a society that con-
trols people in part through their visibility is that of invisibility, the
watcher" (44). When Charlie looks at the vehicle of ascent rather than
through it, he perceives the artifice of this power structure. Perhaps
white supremacy and the imperial logic that it undergirds is baseless,
in which case "you weren't standing on anything at all" in claiming its
power. In Charlie's queasy recognition of white privilege as a Great
Glass Elevator, Dahl acknowledges both the power and the fragility
of whiteness as an ideal of mastery and rationality.
414 Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry
In Boy, Dahl's childhood fantasy of joining Mr. Cadbury in
his global operations is unchecked and unreflective: "It was lovely
dreaming those dreams" (149). Even so, this anecdote betrays that
the ideal of whiteness attempts to contain the sensuous power of
chocolate itself. Dahl "picture[s] a long white room like a laboratory
with pots of chocolate and fudge and all sorts of other delicious fillings
bubbling away on the stoves" (148). In this fantasy the appetitive
child can bear the "unbearably delicious" thanks to industrial space
and clinical detachment, both betokened by the color white: "men
and women in white coats moved between the bubbling pots, tasting
and mixing and concocting their wonderful new inventions. It is tell-
ing that this utopian anecdote appears within Dahl's narration of his
painful indoctrination into the hierarchical life of a British boarding
school. Dahl longs for imperial discipline's replacement by industrial
innovation, but both systems offer salutary insulation against scarring
difference. (The other boys tell Dahl that he must not have "ordinary"
skin because their beatings show up so visibly on his flesh [Boy 142].)
It is only in "Charlie's Chocolate Boy" that Dahl breaks the container,
allows the messy chocolate to flow, and immerses his vulnerable hero
in its overwhelming sensations and repressed histories.

Becoming the Chocolate Boy

"Charlie's Chocolate Boy" features Charlie, a black boy who
visits Wonka's magical chocolate factory with his parents. In this
early draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory there are no Oompa-
Loompas, no overt allusions to Africa. After a tour of the chocolate
factory in which all of the other children meet with bad ends, Charlie
also winds up in hot water—or rather, hot chocolate—as he clam-
bers into a chocolate mold in the Easter Egg room and is cast as a
chocolate boy. No one realizes that Charlie has been trapped and
nearly suffocated by the chocolate. Wonka sends this treat from the
factory to his house to present to his son for Easter. (In a striking
difference from the published novel, Wonka has a wife and child in
this draft.) Stuck overnight in Wonka's library, Charlie witnesses a
burglary. In the morning Charlie draws the police inspector's attention
through some well-timed grunts and groans, and Wonka breaks the
chocolate boy in half and releases him. Charlie informs the police of
the culprits' destination, and Wonka rewards him with "the biggest
chocolate shop in the world" (86), which "occupies a whole block in
the centre of the city" (87).
This plot recapitulates familiar racist tropes, including the motif
of the edible black child. However, as Kyla Wazana Tompkins notes
in Racial Indigestion, the edible black child—disturbing as the trope
 Keyser 415
may be—often reveals the possibility of "racial fluidity" (169), and
"Charlie's Chocolate Boy" is no exception. In spite of the typescript's
awkward use of dialect—Charlie's mother calls him "baby," while he
calls her "mammy" (16)—at several points in the narrative Dahl draws
attention to the way bodies are colored and marked in a process of
racialization. Augustus's face is "painted brown with chocolate" when
he falls into the chocolate river (17); Mr. Bucket "go[es] black in the
face" while listening to a song about how much parents would enjoy
eating their nasty daughter if she were turned into peanut brittle
(23); and Mr. Bucket marvels that Violet is now "Blue as ink" after
she chews experimental chewing gum (29). While all three of these
examples articulate a racist logic in which emotion makes black faces
blacker and contamination darkens skin, they also destabilize race
as inherited and immutable.
This instability of race finds its apotheosis in Charlie's encase-
ment in chocolate. While Dahl introduces Charlie with the racial label
of "NEGRO" it is not until Charlie takes his place in the chocolate
mold, "beautifully hollowed out in the shape of a boy's figure" (57),
that he finds himself choking on "warm sticky liquid" (59) and it be-
comes "impossible for him to use his voice" (60). In her discussion
of the trope of black edibility in nineteenth-century literature and
culture, Tompkins writes evocatively of textual "moments when the
ingestion and figuration of blackness . . . chokes—in other words
when blackness pushes back at its devouring racial other and thus
not only rejects white desire but also complicates the mythology of
whiteness itself. . . . [T]he black body is always 'sticky' in the white
domestic unconscious, just like the syrup in the Aunt Jemima bottle"
(92). Charlie's experience inside the chocolate boy comprises one
such disruptive textual moment for the "white domestic unconscious"
represented by the Wonka family home. Not only does Charlie's pain
complicate his transformation into a treat for Wonka's son (making
the chocolate boys that the factory manufactures more sinister than
cute), his anger and terror also evoke a contemporaneous history
of black consciousness that complicates the draft's assimilationist
ending, which sees Charlie happily taking his place as an urban re-
tailer selling Wonka's wares. (Note that even in this fantasy of the
good black boy, Charlie becomes a subordinate rather than Wonka's
heir.) Dahl acknowledges Charlie's suffering with the episode of the
chocolate boy and thus metaphorically explores the painful effects
of racial interpellation. Once Charlie becomes the "Chocolate Boy,"
he can no longer be seen: "It was far worse than being bound and
gagged because he was also completely invisible!" (64). Deploying
language of (in)visibility, voicelessness, and childhood development
that resonates with Richard Wright's Black Boy, Ralph Ellison's In-
416 Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry
visible Man, and Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Dahl links
claustrophobia and racialization as Charlie is forced into a shell that
shapes his body into the spectacle that the rest of the world wants to
see: "One more Chocolate Boy, as perfect as they always are!" (61).
Charlie Bucket is a brown-skinned boy wearing a "thick hard
suit of chocolate" (61). The convention of the chocolate boy relied on
the idea of exteriors belying interiors. For example, the popular 1919
minstrel song "My Sugar-Coated Chocolate Boy"—recorded by white
tenors Henry Burr and Albert Campbell— conveyed multiple layers
of masquerade. The two white male singers sang from the point of
view of a widowed black mother about a black child shunned by his
white peers but truly "white" inside: "White beauty is skin deep, that's
true, / They may be just as black as you; / Your heart is of the whitest
hue" (Mahoney). The song uses the trope of edibility to sentimental-
ize childhood and commodify blackness while reinforcing the moral
identification of whiteness with goodness. In "Charlie's Chocolate
Boy" these layers are literally cracked open as Charlie emerges from
the chocolate boy "pale, exhausted, frightened . . . like some small
strange bird that had come too early out of its egg" (80). Here we
encounter not two white men playing a black role, but a black boy
who has been forced into a role that both superficially resembles
him—"The mould fitted him perfectly! His head and shoulders, his
body, his legs, his arms, and even his fingers fitted almost exactly into
all the corresponding hollowed out places" (57)—and almost fatally
confines him: "all around him, he could feel the chocolate growing
rapidly harder and harder, shrinking tightly against his body" (61).
Dahl associates the physical process of racialization with pain
and imprisonment, thus citing slavery without explicitly naming it.
In the minstrel song, the sweetness of the "Sugar-Coated Chocolate
Boy" makes him easy to swallow for a white audience; the pain of his
exclusion is resolved through ministrations of maternal love and the
promise of equality in the afterlife: "the good Lord loves the darkies
too." When Charlie is enclosed in the chocolate boy, the threats to
his body and his subjectivity are overwhelming. The reader is forced
to share in his point of view and sensory impressions: "it was the
most horrendous feeling being imprisoned in that dark metal box.
The metal was cold all around him, and it shut off the outer world so
completely that the noises and the clanging and the shoutings of the
great Easter-Egg Room came to him now only very faintly, as though
from miles and miles away" (58). Dahl's description of this imprison-
ment invokes the Middle Passage, including the threat of drowning:

at once he opened his mouth to yell Stop! Stop! Stop!, but

the chocolate was already rushing up over his chest and
 Keyser 417
neck and chin and face, and as soon as he opened his lips
to shout, the chocolate came pouring into his mouth and
choking him. There was no question of shouting. There
was no question of making any noise at all. The only thing
he could do was to shut his lips again tight and keep them
shut otherwise he would have been literally drowned in
chocolate. (59–60)

Charlie observes that "He was in a double prison now. To be inside

the Chocolate Boy alone was bad enough, but to be shut into a box as
well . . ." (66). This evocation of the horrors of slavery—with Charlie
treated not as a human being but as a gift for Wonka's son—comes
as a surprise from Dahl, who in the finished version of the novel
describes the Oompa-Loompas' trip from Africa to England through
Wonka's blithe perspective: "I smuggled them over in large pack-
ing cases with holes in them, and they all got here safely. They are
wonderful workers. They all speak English now" (76). The early draft,
by contrast, insists that the racialization of bodies takes place at the
cost of subjectivity and wholeness. Charlie is effectively tortured by
his confinement in the chocolate boy.
Though Charlie survives his experience inside the chocolate boy,
the novel is haunted by the possibility of children sacrificed at the
altar of chocolate production. Disembodied voices sing the moralizing
songs that in later drafts would become Oompa-Loompa choruses,
and Charlie guesses that these voices must come from "all the other
children who've disappeared in the factory for years and years back"
(50). Wonka conveniently forgets that any children have disappeared
in his factory in spite of immediate evidence to the contrary: "'I don't
know what you mean,' Mr. Wonka told him. 'No children have ever
disappeared in my factory. Not for long, anyway. At least . . . I don't
think they have . . ." (50). At the conclusion of "Charlie's Chocolate
Boy" Dahl makes a point of restoring the children who vanished dur-
ing Charlie's tour of the chocolate factory, as he would also do in the
final version of the novel. Nonetheless, the metaphorical resonances
between Charlie's imprisonment and the Middle Passage—coupled
with the ghostly voices of the children who "disappeared" in the
chocolate factory—together generate the "historical ambiguity" that
Brown posits as one key to political critique. Slavery and suffering
children are both the stuff of the past and of the present, both histori-
cal and ongoing, both a product of empire and a product of industry.23
Wonka's uncertainty about the consequences of his enterprise—"At
least . . . I don't think they have"—may reflect Dahl's uncertainty
about the moral status of his utopia.
Indeed, in these early drafts, characters voice their concerns
about the chocolate factory's potential as a destructive mechanism
418 Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry
rather than as a land of plenty. In a handwritten draft of "Charlie's
Chocolate Boy," one of the parents says to Wonka: "We didn't bring
Tommy in here just to feed your rotten fudge machine! We brought
him here for your fudge machine to feed him! You've got it the wrong
way round a bit, haven't you, Wonka?" In the typescript version, after
he emerges from his chocolate shell, Charlie asks about the fates of
the other children who came on the chocolate factory tour. Wonka
replies: "I run a chocolate factory, you know, not a butcher's shop"
(83). Playing with the trope of cannibalism, which has already been
evoked in Charlie's transformation into a chocolate boy, Dahl places
this emblem of savagery at the heart of industrial production and
corporate globalization. Because of Charlie's embodied experience, in
which he is rendered passive and vulnerable as a child and particularly
as a chocolate boy, he recalls the bodies that were transformed and
destroyed by the mechanization of the chocolate factory.
While in these drafts Dahl implicates Wonka, who seems un-
comfortably unaware of the victims of his enterprise, in the untitled
third draft—the first in which Dahl introduced characters resembling
the Oompa-Loompas—Dahl vindicates the chocolate industry by
associating it with imperialism as an engine of enlightenment and
protection rather than enslavement and violence. Wonka travels to
Africa to buy cacao and encounters plantation owner Yuppsillanly
Slobbosh, a villainous Simon Legree. Pygmy tribesmen known as the
Whipple-Scrumpets—whose very name makes them sound like ed-
ible teatime treats—steal cacao beans from Slobbosh's trees, and he
prides himself on shooting them. Wonka remonstrates: "You've shot
a human being! . . . Your wretched cacao beans aren't as important
as people's lives!" (Untitled Third Draft). When Wonka repatriates
the Whipple-Scrumpets to his factory, it is an act of liberation rather
than exploitation. The global industrial food system thus renovates
imperialism for an age of human rights discourse.24
At the same time, Dahl makes the Whipple-Scrumpets pure,
primitive others who cannot participate in the alimentary economy.
They "become violently ill" if they eat anything but cacao beans,
and while there "used to be wild cacao trees in the jungle, plenty
of them," now that they have died off the Whipple-Scrumpets can't
survive because of their "very peculiar and delicate stomachs." Thus,
even as Dahl suggests that the cacao plantation owner is enacting
a kind of genocide, he also implies that the Whipple-Scrumpets are
leftovers of a now impossible world of purity and proximity to na-
ture: the chief was "almost pure black. His teeth were very white.
His face was deeply wrinkled. He wore a deerskin over his body. He
was very gentle." When Wonka ships the Whipple-Scrumpets back
to his factory he labels the crates "cacao beans," suggesting the
 Keyser 419
proximity between raw materials and supposedly primitive cultures.
These tribesman, whom Slobosh calls "queer little thing[s]," do col-
lapse into mere "things" even in Dahl's admiring perspective on their
strangeness and purity.
These early drafts establish that Dahl was working through,
however uncomfortably or unevenly, the relationship between the
imperial past and the global-industrial present. He linked racialization
with the physical vulnerability of childhood, both indicating that be-
coming a racial minority is a process of painful interpellation and also
suggesting that the violent (mis)use of children's bodies is a repressed
corollary to globalized industry. As he developed the characters of
the Whipple-Scrumpets (later to become the Oompa-Loompas) and
replaced black boy Charlie Bucket with a white hero, Dahl moved away
from the critical vision that undergirded these early versions. He let go
of some of the grimmer insights of the text, which in its final version
makes it fairly easy for a child reader to disengage from the forms of
physical torture endured by the bad children who tour the factory. This
revision may have reflected marketing considerations: after reading
the draft, literary agent Sheila Saint Lawrence advised Dahl against
making Charlie black, cautioning him not to use the word "Mammy"
and suggesting that Wonka's factory workers be more "surprising"
than the original white-coated lab assistants (Saint Lawrence). It is
disheartening to realize that while Saint Lawrence saw the explicit
racial politics of "Charlie's Chocolate Boy" as too controversial, she
encouraged (albeit indirectly) the commodification of difference that
resulted in the Oompa-Loompa caricatures. The Oompa-Loompas
become objects that make the factory operate, not only by running
its machinery but also by testing its products. In the untitled third
draft, Wonka is outraged by Slobosh's imperial greed: "your wretched
cacao beans aren't as important as people's lives!" In the published
novel, Wonka blandly reports the effects of his experiments on the
Oompa-Loompas. Dahl seems unable to imagine a global-industrial
utopia that does not rely on slavery. At the same time, some of the
insights about racialization, childhood, and exploitation that animate
these early drafts help to shape the final version of the novel and
make it possible to read its imperial vision against the grain. What
happens if we place the Oompa-Loompas at the center of the moral
geography of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory rather than the
periphery?25 What is the view from the ground rather than from the
Great Glass Elevator?
420 Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry

A Return to the Chocolate Factory

In the novel, Wonka encourages the children to think of him as
their compatriot: "Welcome, my little friends! Welcome to the fac-
tory!" (Charlie 66). His candies seem to facilitate children's subversive
agency: "LUMINOUS LOLLIES FOR EATING IN BED AT NIGHT" (132),
"STICK-JAW FOR TALKATIVE PARENTS," "INVISIBLE CHOCOLATE
BARS FOR EATING IN CLASS" (133). This form of agency is limited,
however, and encourages children to think of themselves as consum-
ers rather than actors, as Susan Honeyman argues: "Sweetness has
always been used as a way of making both the physical and ideological
palatable—a process that seems especially relevant in child rearing
and commercial child culture" (82). In Wonka's factory, both slavery
and sweets seem delicious, as Veruca Salt acknowledges in acquisi-
tive ecstasy: "I want you to buy me a big pink boiled-sweet boat
exactly like Mr. Wonka's! And I want lots of Oompa-Loompas to row
me about, and I want a chocolate river and I want . . . I want . . ."
(92). Though the novel punishes Veruca Salt for this wanting, she is
articulating the logic of candy marketing that targets white children,
the same imperial fantasy that facilitates Charlie's happy ending.
If we look past the diminutive ringmaster Wonka as an appealing
alter ego for the children, however, we can see parallels between our
hero Charlie and the Oompa-Loompas—parallels that both confirm
Dahl's racist iconography (infantilized black people) and also offer
an entrance point for empathetic identification between child readers
and Oompa-Loompa laborers. Charlie and the Oompa-Loompas both
experience intense desire. "The one thing he longed for more than
anything else was . . . CHOCOLATE" (6), and the Oompa-Loompas
"dream about cacao beans all night and talk about them all day" (79).
Charlie and the Oompa-Loompas are also physically vulnerable and
painfully hungry. When the Bucket family "began to starve" (46),
Charlie, "a growing boy," suffers the most (47). When Wonka finds the
Oompa-Loompas in the jungle, similarly, they are "practically starving
to death" (78). Finally, in a crucial parallel—which contributes both
to their difficulty in authoring their own pleasures and to their sus-
ceptibility to unrelenting pain—neither children nor Oompa-Loompas
own themselves; they both have guardians (parents or grandparents
in the former instance and Willy Wonka in the latter).
It is perhaps overdetermined, given their shared vulnerability,
that the narrative fates of Charlie and the Oompa-Loompas are so
disparate. The superiority of Charlie's whiteness is reasserted, the
importance of racial difference in the social structure defended. The
bad children, by contrast, are forced to inhabit—indeed, to embody—
difference, and it is in this narrative that identificatory possibilities
productively open up. To imagine racial difference as a childhood
 Keyser 421
punishment is a familiar racist trope; one 1845 German tale, "The
Story of the Inky Boys," describes three white boys whose teacher
dips them in ink because they taunted a "Black-a-moor," and their
transformation is clearly a threat to other children who might do the
same (Martin 9). At the same time, the process of changing color also
rebukes the position of transcendent whiteness and imperial vision
that Charlie adopts (however uneasily) at the novel's end. Each of the
Golden Ticket winners begins the novel as a media icon: "cameras
were clicking and flashbulbs were flashing, and people were push-
ing and jostling and trying to get a bit closer" (37). Once they come
through the factory, they are marked with difference: they are "thin
as a straw" (160), "purple in the face" (161), "covered with garbage,"
"ten feet tall and thin as a wire." This process has made them less
invisibly white, and Charlie is "looking down" on them (159). The
factory thus reshapes the children into Others, the objects of the
imperial gaze rather than its consumer subjects.
The factory, rather than simply confirming a bucolic cooperation
between white laborers, white tourists, and pastoralized industry,
teaches the children about how the industrial food system trans-
forms, mechanizes, and even wounds the body. Rather than maintain
their aloof disregard as consumers, these children enter the guts of
the factory, learning the visceral costs of the production line rather
than the gourmet pleasures of its output. Of course, it is a sign of
imperial power that the white children can move between white and
racialized subject positions; they can try on subalternity while the
Oompa-Loompas can never try on whiteness.26 The white children,
although they are forced to inhabit marked bodies and to experience
the travails of factory life, count in a way that the Oompa-Loompas
never do. In this way, the uneven empathy accorded the characters in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory anticipates a genre of contemporary
responses to the global industrial food system, one that fears the
contamination of the (white) consumer rather than the exploitation
or enslavement of the (brown or black) worker—or, rather, that fears
the latter only insofar as it affects the former.
In spite of these admittedly profound limitations, the nascent
parallels between the children and the Oompa-Loompas give readers
an opportunity to make new moral and ethical connections between
white, first-world consumers and nonwhite, third-world laborers. By
making the Oompa-Loompas proximate to Veruca Salt and by mak-
ing Charlie Bucket a "Chocolate Boy," Dahl compresses the global
geography that obscures the interrelations of industry.27 As Sidney
Mintz observes, the connection between "cane growing in the fields
and white sugar in my cup . . . was not simply one of technical
transformation, impressive as that is, but also the mystery of people
422 Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry
unknown to one another being linked through space and time—and
not just by politics and economics, but along a particular chain of
connection maintained by their production" (xxiv). This chain of con-
nection enables empathy and critique.
When the children visiting the factory are physically transformed,
they inspire the sympathy that the Oompa-Loompas fail to elicit.
Charlie asks if Augustus Gloop is "really all right? . . . Even after
going up that awful pipe?" (160). With expostulations like "Good
gracious!" and "Good heavens!" (161), Grandpa Joe and Charlie both
acknowledge the pain and suffering that Wonka refuses to see. Wonka
instead insists that each transformation is an improvement, just as
he insisted that the Oompa-Loompas have a better life in his factory
than they did in their native land. Wonka exclaims, "how healthy
[Violet] looks! Much better than before!" Grandpa Joe counters: "But
she's purple in the face!" Mike TeaVee is "about ten feet tall and thin
as a wire." Charlie sees that this is "dreadful for him," while Wonka
claims that he is "very lucky. Every basketball team in the country
will be trying to get him."
For Wonka, difference can always be commodified, like the choc-
olate boys in Dahl's early draft. From his perspective those chocolate
boys are fabulous facsimiles that confirm industrial abundance. In
spite of Wonka's insistence that "small boys are extremely springy
and elastic" and "stretch like mad" (148), this putative resilience is
belied by the sorry spectacle of the chastened children. Indeed, the
parallel between racialized labor and childhood vulnerability in this
novel reveals the obscured dependence of the chocolate industry on
child labor. Though children's bodies may not be as elastic as Wonka
opines, he relies on their ideological impressionability: "A grown-up
won't listen to me; he won't learn. He will try to do things his own way
and not mine. So I have to have a child" (163). Wonka construes the
child's capacity to learn as an opportunity to extend corporate power
and racial hegemony into the future: "Someone's got to keep [the
factory] going—if only for the sake of the Oompa-Loompas" (163).
But this same ideological openness makes counterreadings and new
identifications available to child readers, as Nel observes: "Books
containing stereotypes . . . invite children to participate in that way of
thinking, but children do not have to accept the invitation." Charlie's
twinges of guilt and sorrow as he watches his erstwhile companions
leave the factory open up a small but significant space for resistance
to the "Candy power!" that Wonka celebrates (158).
 Keyser 423

Notes
This essay benefited from the critical expertise and intellectual gen-
erosity of Greg Forter, Anne Gulick, Philip Nel, and Sara Schwebel. I
am also grateful to the members of the Children's Literature Faculty
Colloquium at the University of South Carolina for responding to an
early draft.
1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from "Charlie's Chocolate Boy"
are drawn from the typescript version of the manuscript.
2. On "Charlie's Chocolate Boy," see Mangan 14–15, Sturrock 397, and
Treglown 135.
3. While Dahl might not have articulated that insight quite so directly
or forcefully, he did later condemn his own ignorance as a "young
pukka-sahib" working for Shell Oil in Dar Es Saleem in the 1930s
and recognized, however incompletely, that imperialism represented
a way of thinking as well as a way of life (Sturrock 110–11).
4. In 1972, Eleanor Cameron famously lambasted Dahl and the Oompa-
Loompas in the Horn Book Magazine. The novel's racism has since
been analyzed by numerous scholars, including Bradford, Bouchard,
Dixon, Nel, and Novy. Even a recent book targeted at fans, Inside
Charlie's Chocolate Factory, includes the subheading "apparent rac-
ism" under the index's entry for "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
(book)" (Mangan 211).
5. For a discussion of postwar racial tensions in England, see Gilroy
95–102.
6. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory are drawn from the 2011 Penguin edition.
7. Nel also reproduces the evolving illustrations of the Oompa-Loompas,
including Schindelman's 1964 illustration of black Oompa-Loompas
in animal skins; the same artist's amply bearded, long-haired, white-
skinned Oompa-Loompas in the book's 1973 edition; and Quentin
Blake's wide-eyed, spiky-haired, white-skinned Oompa-Loompas in
the 1998 edition.
8. On the connection between "animatedness" and racial difference,
which I see borne out in the characterization of the Oompa-Loompas,
see Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 89–125.
9. On the commodification of black bodies, see Bernstein 30–68, Tomp-
kins 145–81, and Witt 21–53.
10. See Witt for a discussion of the Aunt Jemima trademark as a white,
corporate appropriation of the black female body as a trope of
abundance derived from minstrel stereotypes (35–36). A similar
promise of productive power is embodied by the multitudes of tiny
Oompa-Loompas, who seem mass-produced like chocolate bars. By
1964, Witt points out, black artists took up the Aunt Jemima figure
and ironized it to political ends, exposing the interdependency of
424 Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry
capitalism and white supremacy (44). Dahl makes no such critical
move with the Oompa-Loompas, and the unironic depiction of the
Sambo figure in this cultural moment was received with justifiable
anger.
11. Kachur notes that "Violet's unauthorized and disrespectful consump-
tion of Wonka's special meal thus becomes a blasphemous spectacle,
and she too must be punished, echoing the New Testament's warning
against taking the Eucharist unworthily, and thereby suffering both
bodily and physical harm. . . . As in the Eucharist, the children's
journey ends in their being literally consumed by, taken up into, what
they consume" (227–28).
12. Violet's fate recalls "The Girl Who Inked Herself," a nineteenth-century
didactic tale in which a dirty, greedy white girl turns black: "Her
parents deem the black girl 'too hideous for a daughter'" (Bernstein
224).
13. Appropriately enough, since Dahl's biggest success for the publishing
house (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) would also center on the
pleasures of the palate, Knopf particularly loved Dahl's New Yorker
story "Taste," about a con perpetrated on a wine connoisseur. After
reading the story aloud to his wife, Knopf called Dahl's agent "per-
sonally to ask if his company could publish a new collection of Dahl's
short stories. It was the beginning of a strong mutual admiration
between the two men" (Sturrock 323).
14. For example, Bradford identifies Dahl's novel as a "British text," which
determines the generic and geographical coordinates of her reading
(198). Henry Luce famously coined the phrase "the American century"
in a Life magazine article, published in the same year Dahl arrived
in Washington. Although Dahl may or may not have been aware of
the phrase, he was certainly aware of Luce; Dahl had an affair with
his wife, Clare Boothe Luce, in 1942 (Sturrock 233).
15. Critics have responded to the geographical indeterminacy of Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory in a range of ways. While Ventura agrees
with Bradford that this is a "British publication . . . [with an] as-
sumed British setting" (241), she suggests that Dahl constructs a
"global child" through international consumerism (242). By contrast,
Honeyman calls Charlie a "surprisingly American-styled hero" (85).
Reconciling these superficially divergent views, I see Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory as an important reflection on Anglo-American
corporate colonialism.
16. Hershey and Cadbury both celebrated the local dairy industry, and
they identified their rural factory town with the thriving nation. See
Moss and Badenoch 75–76, Quirke 109–10, and Hall 39–41.
17. For an example of this type of promotional postcard, see "Hershey
Chocolate Factory."
18. On the moral program that Hershey and Cadbury envisioned, see
Quirke 110–11 and Satre 15–16.
 Keyser 425
19. On advertising chocolate as a domestic commodity that could nurture
the white working and middle classes, see Outka 39–40 and Moss
and Badenoch 67–68.
20. Richard Dyer argues that whiteness is associated with such organi-
zation of materials and persons: "The white spirit organises white
flesh and in turn non-white flesh and other material matters; it has
enterprise. Imperialism is the key historical form in which that pro-
cess has been realised" (15). Dahl's factory—its planned meadow,
glass pipes, and happy, racialized workers—offers an idealized view of
enterprise, which in turn evidences Wonka's possession of "will—the
control of self and control of others" central to the mythos of white-
ness (Dyer 31).
21. Cows figure prominently in promotional materials for Cadbury and
Hershey. See Bradley 102 and "Milking a Cow."
22. Grant points out that "in evaluating acquisition policies in West Africa,
[Cadbury] consistently prioritized production at home" (113). For
quite some time, Cadbury followed a policy of see-no-evil, hear-no-
evil regarding his overseas suppliers: "The firm would not knowingly
use slave-harvested cocoa in the manufacture of its chocolate" (Higgs
9)
23. On child labor and the cocoa industry, see Nevinson 38, Off 119–38,
and Ryan 43–62.
24. Mutua points out that "industrial democracies in the last two decades
have worked to link human rights to aspects of foreign policy such
as development assistance, aid, and trade with non-Western states"
(24). Slaughter concurs that "the human rights conception of the hu-
man being as a person has a discursive genealogy that is entangled
with the corporation and capitalism" (21). The discourse of human
rights, then, often facilitates global capitalism and systemic racism
rather than checking their operations.
25. On the political and epistemological importance of viewing capitalist
modernity from the margins, see Chakrabarty 254.
26. Mohanty describes the classic account of the imperial subject in fic-
tions of childhood, in which children impersonate subalternity but
ultimately adopt the mantle of whiteness. Martin points out that in
"The Inky Boys," the three cruel white boys become black and learn
a lesson while the Black-a-moor, objectified and mute, can never
become white (9–10).
27. Both Behzadi and Ventura note that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
also explores the effects of globalized industry through the Oompa-
Loompas.
426 Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry

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