1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910825888803321

Autore

Tompkins Kyla Wazana

Titolo

Racial Indigestion : Eating Bodies in the 19th Century / / Kyla Wazana Tompkins

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY : , : New York University Press, , [2012]

©2012

ISBN

0-8147-3837-0

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (323 p.)

Collana

America and the Long 19th Century ; ; 5

Disciplina

394.1/20973

Soggetti

Food in literature

Human body - Social aspects - United States - History - 19th century

Cooking - Social aspects - United States - History - 19th century

Diet - Social aspects - United States - History - 19th century

Food habits - Social aspects - United States - History - 19th century

United States Race relations History 19th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Kitchen Insurrections -- 2 “She Made the Table a Snare to Them” -- 3 “Everything ’Cept Eat Us” -- 4 A Wholesome Girl -- 5 “What’s De Use Talking ’Bout Dem ’Mendments?” -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author

Sommario/riassunto

The act of eating is both erotic and violent, as one wholly consumes the object being eaten. At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists outside her body. Racial Indigestion explores the links between food, visual and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States to reveal how eating produces political subjects by justifying the social discourses that create bodily meaning. 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.