eBook

Racial Indigestion

Kyla Wazana Tompkins

2012

Overview

Winner of the 2013 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize presented by the American Studies AssociationThe 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 Indigestiontells 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 Indigestionsheds light on contemporary foodie culture's vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism and race privilege.

• Publisher: NYU Press,New York University Press
• Subject: 19th century / 20th Century / Alcott, Louisa May, 1832-1888 / Alcott, Louisa May, 1832-1888 -- Criticism and interpretation / Cooking / Cooking -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 19th century / Criticism and interpretation / Diet / Diet -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 19th century / Food habits / Food habits -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 19th century / Food in literature / Graham, Sylvester, 1794-1851 / HISTORY / Human body / Human body -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 19th century / Race relations / Social aspects / United States / United States -- Race relations -- History -- 19th century
• ISBN: 0814770029, 9780814770023, 0814770037, 9780814770030, 9780814770054, 0814770053