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Chapter 12 - Comic Books and the Culinary Logic of Late Capitalism

from Part II - Developments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2018

Gitanjali G. Shahani
Affiliation:
San Francisco State University
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Summary

This chapter examines the relationship between food, violence, and capitalism in three comic book series on food, Get Jiro! and Get Jiro! Blood and Sushi, Starve, and Chew. I argue that in these series, which share a number of important themes and representational tropes, food as the symbol of nature, unsullied human existence, and truth, becomes a way to countenance the corrupting violence of capitalism. Food also serves as a symbol of an authentic human bond, one that is prior to and beyond capital. It stands as the basis of a critique of the violence of the contractual reason that is essential to capitalism. The protagonists, each of who is necessarily an outsider figure, have a profoundly ambivalent relationship to capitalism. Food has been a blessing and curse for each of them. It is a burden, yet also redeems them, just as each of them seeks to redeem food from the malevolent influence of capitalism. The world of food in these works embodies the contradictory logic of late capitalism, in which food culture and the chefs are both hyper-commodified and hyper-mediated yet are the source of critique and opposition to the very culture that produces them. Situating the food comic subgenre of comic books in the context of the recent global surge of interest in food culture and at the juncture of several traditions of representation, I consider the political implications of the critique that it offers about present-day market-mediated representations of food.
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Chapter
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Food and Literature , pp. 237 - 250
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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References

Bourdain, Anthony, and Rose, Joel. Get Jiro! Blood and Sushi. Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2015.Google Scholar
Bourdain, Anthony, and Rose, Joel. Get Jiro! Burbank, CA: DC Comics, 2012.Google Scholar
Garcia, Santiago. On the Graphic Novel. Translated by Bruce Campbell. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.Google Scholar
Henderson, Fergus. The Whole Beast: Nose-to-Tail Eating. New York: Ecco, 2004.Google Scholar
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Layman, John. Chew. Vol. 1, Taster’s Choice. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2017.Google Scholar
O’Malley, Bryan Lee. Seconds: A Graphic Novel. New York: Ballantine Books, 2014.Google Scholar
Parasecoli, Fabio. Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012.Google Scholar
Parker-Pope, Tara. “An Omnivore Defends Real Food.” New York Times, January 17, 2008. https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/an-omnivore-defends-real-food/comment-page-10.Google Scholar
Wood, Brian, Zezelj, Danijel, and Stewart, Dave. Starve. Vols. 1–2. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2016.Google Scholar

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