Kyla Wazana Tompkins
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 and 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 childrenâ€™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 â€œfoodieâ€ cultureâ€™s vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism, and race privilege.
History,Nonfiction,Food and Drink,Food,Race,Culture,Cultural Studies,North American Hi...,American History,Philosophy,Theory,Academic,Grad School,Criticism
Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century