Racial indigestion : eating bodies in the 19th century / Kyla Wazana Tompkins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana.

Series:

America and the long 19th century

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Alcott, Louisa May, 1832-1888.

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

Food habits.

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

Diet.

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

Cooking.

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

Human body.

Criticism and interpretation.

Race relations.

History.

Human body--Social aspects.

Cooking--Social aspects.

Diet--Social aspects.

Food habits--Social aspects.

United States--Race relations--History--19th century.

United States.

Graham, Sylvester, 1794-1851.

Graham, Sylvester.

Alcott, Louisa May, 1832-1888--Criticism and interpretation.

Alcott, Louisa May.

Food in literature.

Physical Description:

xiii, 275 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, [2012]

Summary:

The act of eating is both erotic and violent. In eating, one wholly consumes the object being eaten; at the same time eating enacts 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, in its many forms, is deployed to shape racial and gendered citizenship in the early history of American biopolitics.

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 an act of political and cultural agency variously linked to 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction : eating bodies in the nineteenth century

Kitchen insurrections

"She made the table a snare to them" : Sylvester Graham's imperial dietetics

"Everything 'cept eat us" : the mouth as political organ in the antebellum novel

A wholesome girl : addiction, Grahamite dietetics and Louisa May Alcott's Rose

Campbell novels

"What's de use talking 'bout dem 'mendments?" : trade cards and late nineteenth-

Century consumer citizenship

Conclusion : racial indigestion.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780814770023

0814770029

9780814770030

0814770037

9780814770054

0814770053

9780814738375

0814738370

OCLC:

764339576