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Chapter 7 - Visceral Encounters

Critical Race Studies and Modern Food Literature

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

Diet and disgust attempt to establish boundaries between social groups, as anthropologist Mary Douglas famously proposed in Purity and Danger. Literature dramatizes the attempts to erect these boundaries and uses ingestive metaphors, dietary practices, and global exchanges to blur them. In twentieth-century U.S. literature, for example, food-related plots and recurring oral images express anxieties and ambivalences surrounding Jim Crow and its fetishization of light skin and supposedly pure white bodies. Beginning with structural anthropologists of the 1960s, moving through black studies of the 1980s, and into hemispheric American studies of the 1990s and 2000s, this essay explores the critical approaches that scholars have used to interrogate this dynamic. As bell hooks argues, eating can be an appropriative act, in which the ethnic other is absorbed by white consumers as an exotic spice, and yet at the same time, eating is an intimate encounter that demonstrates the permeability of the body. 
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Food and Literature , pp. 147 - 168
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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