Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology of Major Works and Events
- Introduction: The Literature of Food
- 1 Medieval Feasts
- 2 The Art of Early Modern Cookery
- 3 The Romantic Revolution in Taste
- 4 The Matter of Early American Taste
- 5 The Culinary Landscape of Victorian Literature
- 6 Modernism and Gastronomy
- 7 Cold War Cooking
- 8 Farm Horror in the Twentieth Century
- 9 Queering the Cookbook
- 10 Guilty Pleasures in Children’s Literature
- 11 Postcolonial Tastes
- 12 Black Power in the Kitchen
- 13 Farmworker Activism
- 14 Digesting Asian America
- 15 Postcolonial Foodways in Contemporary African Literature
- 16 Blogging Food, Performing Gender
- Selected Guide to Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to Literature
11 - Postcolonial Tastes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2020
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology of Major Works and Events
- Introduction: The Literature of Food
- 1 Medieval Feasts
- 2 The Art of Early Modern Cookery
- 3 The Romantic Revolution in Taste
- 4 The Matter of Early American Taste
- 5 The Culinary Landscape of Victorian Literature
- 6 Modernism and Gastronomy
- 7 Cold War Cooking
- 8 Farm Horror in the Twentieth Century
- 9 Queering the Cookbook
- 10 Guilty Pleasures in Children’s Literature
- 11 Postcolonial Tastes
- 12 Black Power in the Kitchen
- 13 Farmworker Activism
- 14 Digesting Asian America
- 15 Postcolonial Foodways in Contemporary African Literature
- 16 Blogging Food, Performing Gender
- Selected Guide to Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to Literature
Summary
Matters of cultivation, cuisine, and alimentary carnality constitute the very marrow of the material, aesthetic, and ethical cultures of empire and of postcoloniality; No history of modern empire can be thought without passing through the mouth, or through the question of consumption in general. This chapter showcases the alimentary longings, primarily but not solely for spices, sugar, and tea, that drove colonial expansion across the world, and the transformation of metropolitan palates and meals that resulted from this expansion. It examines the dialectic between metropolitan appetite and the production of deprivation in the colony, focusing in particular on slave hunger in plantations and on recurrent famine as one of the features of colonial rule and the market-driven order it institutes. It underlines the significance of hunger as a still resonant form of anti-imperial protest. Above all, it parses the ways in which postcolonial writers mobilize an ecology of alimentation to speak to experiences of colonialism, decolonisation, postcoloniality, and late capitalist globalisation.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food , pp. 161 - 181Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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