Racial Indigestion is a book about food, sex, race and how they all became intertwined in the nineteenth-century United States. It is my first book, and will be published on July 30, 2012, by New York University Press. Kyla Wazana Tompkins is an Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at Pomona College, and a former food writer and restaurant critic. I write about food, eating, sexuality, race and nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, culture, film and dance.
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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.
