(New) Dates for Upcoming Talks

imageI will be giving talks about my book and presenting some new work at the following institutions this year. I’ll post details as I get them.

2013    Colby College, February 12.

2013    Bowdoin College, February 13.

2013    University of Pennsylvania Americanists Group. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. February 20.

2013   University of Maryland, American Studies. Baltimore, Maryland. March 8.

2013    College of William and Mary. Keynote address. Williamsburg, Virginia. March 14.

2013    Harvard University; Charles Warren Center. March 28.

2013    Simmons College, April 17.

2013    NYU and The New School Food Studies, co-sponsored. May 1.

2013    Stanford University. May 10.

2013    ACCUTE plenary address, Victoria, B.C. June 1-4.

2013    Washington University in Saint Louis, October 10-11.

I was recently asked to write a response to Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, a book that has been intensely formative for me, and to whose standards I aspire in my work. The response was posted at the Social Text blog, Periscope, alongside a group of amazing and smart intellectuals and academics.  Here is a link to the blog and here is a link to my article, which takes up questions about eating, obesity, food and the politics of precarity and pleasure. Cruel Optimism won the Allan Bray Memorial Book Prize for 2012. High-res

I was recently asked to write a response to Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, a book that has been intensely formative for me, and to whose standards I aspire in my work. The response was posted at the Social Text blog, Periscope, alongside a group of amazing and smart intellectuals and academics. 

Here is a link to the blog and here is a link to my article, which takes up questions about eating, obesity, food and the politics of precarity and pleasure. Cruel Optimism won the Allan Bray Memorial Book Prize for 2012.

Above is a picture of morcilla, a kind of blood sausage made in Puerto Rico. The idea of innards, guts and offal is central to one of my upcoming projects, a co-edited special issue of GLQ: The Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, entitled On The Visceral. The cfp has its own tumblr here. Please visit: the deadline for abstracts is February 15th. High-res

Above is a picture of morcilla, a kind of blood sausage made in Puerto Rico. The idea of innards, guts and offal is central to one of my upcoming projects, a co-edited special issue of GLQ: The Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, entitled On The Visceral. The cfp has its own tumblr here. Please visit: the deadline for abstracts is February 15th.

The introduction to Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in The Nineteenth Century lays out the fundamentals of my argument and the outline of the chapters. You can find it here.

The introduction to Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in The Nineteenth Century lays out the fundamentals of my argument and the outline of the chapters. You can find it here.

This is one of my favorite images in the book. It’s an image of the black theatre in the late nineteenth century. The image is being used to advertise a product but more importantly for my purposes, it shows an active and vital black cultural sphere, one in which the historical relationship between the black subject and food is picked up and used in theatrical production as an affirmation of desire.  High-res

This is one of my favorite images in the book. It’s an image of the black theatre in the late nineteenth century. The image is being used to advertise a product but more importantly for my purposes, it shows an active and vital black cultural sphere, one in which the historical relationship between the black subject and food is picked up and used in theatrical production as an affirmation of desire. 

What the Book is About

There are five very different chapters in the book, with very different casts of characters. But across the book, there are really a few central questions: how do people use eating to tell stories about who they are? why and how did food become a way of telling stories about racial difference? why is eating often a metaphor for, or itself a mode of expressing, erotic or sexual feelings?

The impetus for the book came from my feeling that what we now recognize as two major ways of relating to food and eating in the contemporary United States -  foodie-ism (the performance of personal specialness and class privilege via elite knowledges about food and/or wine) and localism (the political movement to cut down on pollution, oppose industrial food and agribusiness, and support local economies) - had a shared history in the consolidation of the United States as a nation organized around the idea that whiteness would be its ideal and most privileged racial identity.

I began with two lines of inquiry, but three texts: the fourth chapter of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and two books written by the nineteenth-century dietetic reformer Sylvester Graham. In future posts, I’ll talk more about where these texts led me…..

* - the image above is from a short story by Louisa May Alcott that I discuss in a forthcoming book chapter. The image is of a little white girl sitting on a cake toadstool, being served by a man named, and made up of, brownies.

Back of the Book

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 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.

I found the cover image for Racial Indigestion while browsing at an online auction site, Ben Crane’s Trade Card Place. I love the playfulness and latent eroticism of the image, and I was particularly intrigued by what remains unsaid: why is the girl’s face covered when the boy’s face is not? Is this image taken from a popular play or song or children’s story? Then too, in a period that frowned upon interracial relations so much, what do we say about the fact that these two figures are facing each other, straddling a peppermint stick? Images like this one were stock images, that advertisers bought from publishers. They then either bought an image for the back of the card or they stamped the name of their store on the front image. There are about 42 images in Racial Indigestion, most of them reprinted in these rich chromoliothographic colors. I’ll be posting more of them in the days to come. High-res

I found the cover image for Racial Indigestion while browsing at an online auction site, Ben Crane’s Trade Card Place. I love the playfulness and latent eroticism of the image, and I was particularly intrigued by what remains unsaid: why is the girl’s face covered when the boy’s face is not? Is this image taken from a popular play or song or children’s story? Then too, in a period that frowned upon interracial relations so much, what do we say about the fact that these two figures are facing each other, straddling a peppermint stick?

Images like this one were stock images, that advertisers bought from publishers. They then either bought an image for the back of the card or they stamped the name of their store on the front image. There are about 42 images in Racial Indigestion, most of them reprinted in these rich chromoliothographic colors. I’ll be posting more of them in the days to come.

Racist Swedish Cake

Eating Race

A few months ago the latest scandal related to an image that I have spent quite a few years researching and writing about - the African or African-American body as an edible object exploded into the media. The New York University Press blog On The Square asked me to contribute a piece, which is linked above.

Chapter Four, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Chapter Four of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the eponymous chapter, and it takes us deep into, as many scholars and critics have discussed, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ideas about domesticity, family and personhood - that is, the right of every human to have feelings and thus political rights.

When I began to write about that chapter as a graduate student I was caught by how Stowe used the language of food to talk about racial difference. I noticed that food was used to describe slave bodies with a kind of familiarity and intimacy that evoked both desire - that slave bodies were sweet and thus, perhaps, delicious - but also disgust - that the language of food in the chapter also allowed for a kind of distancing from those characters, as though they were both desirable and less-than-human.

How has the language of food come to be attached to race in America? When I began to study and write about food I was living a double and triple life: as a graduate student, as someone very active in anti-racist and anti-violence movements, and as a die-hard aesthete and food writer. In many senses, writing Racial Indigestion has been about answering the question: why are people willing to eat food that is somehow linked to or representative of the same people they might never know, or for that matter, love? What is it about eating that allows for that contradiction?

In Racial Indigestion I try to get at some answers to those questions by thinking about eating as a historical act, that is, an act that often seems as natural, as universal, a mode of relating to the world as one could possibly imagine. Everyone eats, right? But then again, perhaps eating is an act, a gesture, a behavior, that has a story to tell about how this thing we call a self, the “me” that is apparently contained inside of my body and skin, relates to everything and everyone that is outside of it.