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Loading... Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (America and the Long 19th Century)by Kyla Wazana Tompkins
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This book is a really incredible intervention in food studies that takes consumption (literally, as in eating) as a mode of racial production, and intervening into Foucault's notion of biopower as being a localized process, rather than something that is located in a larger European state. It's also an incredibly beautifully written book--Tompkins' writing really aligns with her argument, and although it is theoretically dense, it's in no way impenetrable. My favorite chapters were chapter three and chapter five, looking at Uncle Tom's Cabin and at trade cards from the author's collection. ( ) no reviews | add a review
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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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)394.1Social sciences Customs, Etiquette, Folklore General Customs Eating, drinking, using drugsLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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