|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
| Subjects: Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, American Studies, History |
| Part of the America and the Long 19th Century Series |
| |
|
The act of eating is both erotic and violent, as one wholly consumes the object being eaten. At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists outside her body. Racial Indigestion explores the links between food, visual and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States to reveal how eating produces political subjects by justifying the social discourses that create bodily meaning.
Combing through a visually stunning and rare archive of children’s literature, architectural history, domestic manuals, dietetic tracts, novels and advertising, Racial Indigestion tells the story of the consolidation of nationalist mythologies of whiteness via the erotic politics of consumption. Less a history of commodities than a history of eating itself, the book seeks to understand how eating became a political act, linked to appetite, vice, virtue, race and class inequality and, finally, the queer pleasures and pitfalls of a burgeoning commodity culture. In so doing, Racial Indigestion sheds light on contemporary “foodie” culture’s vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism and race privilege.
|
|
|
Kyla Wazana Tompkins
is an Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Pomona
College. She is a former journalist
and restaurant critic.
View all books by Kyla Tompkins |
|
| | “A dazzlingly original and important contribution to our
understanding of nineteenth-century American literature and culture. It brings
together the still-emergent field of food studies with Americanist literary and
cultural studies, but not in order to ‘apply’ a set food studies methodology to
literature, or merely to trace a theme. Tompkins brings a new lens to bear on
the cultural forms of a particular time and place, resulting in new insights
into familiar texts but also in new ways of seeing archives that may not have
seemed worth further exploration.” | | -Glenn Hendler, Fordham University |
| | “Racial Indigestion is as creative as it is theoretically rigorous and archivally grounded. Tompkins sets forth a marvelous, fruitful array of analytic sites and clever juxtapositions, tracing the politics inherent in the decline of the hearth and the rise of stoves, reimagining the mouth as the window to an alimentary politics, and tracking the post-Reconstruction politics of trade cards. The connections she makes between eating and vernacular culture make the book satisfyingly literary, even as it is so clearly a stellar work of cultural studies.” | | -Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |