Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th C

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.

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.

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.

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.