Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century

America and the Long 19th Century Series

by Kyla Wazana Tompkins

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 and 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.

Genres: History, Food, Nonfiction, Race, Cultural Studies, Culinary, Theory

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Ai Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a really incredible intervention in food studies that takes consumption (literally, as in eating) as a mode of racial production, and intervening into Foucault's notion of biopower as being a localized process, rather than something that is located in a larger European state. It's also an incredibly beautifully written book--Tompkins' writing really aligns with her argument, and although it is theoretically dense, it's in no way impenetrable. My favorite chapters were chapter three and chapter five, looking at Uncle Tom's Cabin and at trade cards from the author's collection.

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tompkins is an engaging and imaginative critic, writing in this study about the association of race and eating in American culture (literary and extraliterary) across the nineteenth century. The scope of her theoretical reach matches the force of her critical punch, and as a result, her book seems to me an exciting model of what food studies (or, as Tompkins would have it, eating studies, resisting the fetishization of the commodity) can and should be.

Tompkins really sinks her teeth into her subject, attending both to the material histories of the kitchen and to the metaphorical power of oral tropes. Tompkins addresses antebellum attempts to regulate the white body and its intake (Graham's obsession with flour and bread), and she analyzes turn-of-the-century trading cards, which, even in their blatantly racist iconography, encourage cross-racial identification and attest to an increasingly interracial public sphere. She writes about addiction and imperialism in the works of Louisa May Alcott, and she links domestic manuals for black servants with subversive oral expression from non-white subjects. Tompkins finds surprising forms of resistance in cultural forms that seem obviously normative, and yet these discoveries always emerge from the archive and its ambivalent and multivalent representations. In other words, Tompkins not only makes surprising arguments; she also makes you see them as utterly unsurprising, as absolutely central to the ideologies and aesthetics of the objects she addresses.

The book is a lot of fun to read and shows Tompkins' own relish for words. The book displays a few trendy tics of contemporary criticism (drinking game: do shots when "biopolitical" or "transnational" comes up), but this is a tiny quibble given the political and aesthetic scope of what Tompkins accomplishes here. Tompkins registers contradiction and complication with acuity and eloquence, and she makes exciting connections between diverse theorists and cultural forms, the critical art of making strange bedfellows and generating a convincing frisson through their union. As a humor scholar as well as a food studies devotee, I particularly applaud the connections she draws between the appetites of the carnivalesque and the subaltern resistances of the hearth. An exciting book.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like a ~3.5; this book started off really engaging and petered out a bit toward the end, but Tompkins's insights on and interventions into a "critical eating studies" are well-taken. Read the intro and first three chapters for sure.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this ambitious project that fuses food studies with body theory, critical race theory, and feminist, queer, and gender studies, Tompkins drafts a 19th Century “literary history of eating culture” (p. 9), which she argues shaped racial formation in the early American republic. Analyzing a variety of material and visual culture forms—novels, chapbooks, poetry, domestic manuals, cookbooks, and 38 advertising trade cards printed in full color in the text—she presents five case studies that orient around the mouth: literally, figuratively, architecturally, and socio-culturally. With high theoretical stakes, Racial Indigestion is an intensely visceral work that while at times difficult to digest makes a powerful contribution to the studies of eating, race, and gender.

[s · Rating 5 out of 5]

read this in fall 2018 for the first time, revisited in spring 2020 for exams. i have no idea why i gave this book only 4 stars when i first read it. the analysis of the jim crow cookie, the intimacies of the ingredients that make it, and the social, cultural, and political ramifications of its consumption is frankly iconic. if i read a book like this before i left literary studies, i might have stayed. the eroticism of eating and her formulation of queer alimentarity is a winner. this book is just stunning and gives me hope that innovative, fun, and sharp academic research can still be done.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

How does looking closely at the mouth, and the process of eating and excreting, change our understandings of bodies and intimacies in the 19th century? Wazana Tompkins reads the mouth and our physical interactions with food the way she reads literature--closely, and with a gaze toward interrogating systems of power and exchange in the making of our food politics and values. The chapter most directly concerning labor is Chapter 1, focused on the displacement of cooking to out-of-sight spaces (where Bee Wilson shares her analysis of it acting as a space of bodily displacement and disengagement, yet where divisions of power and labor were also made). This is then amplified in her reading of eating black bodies as a way to maintain white supremacy in Chapter 3, where she looks at the eating of a gingerbread blackface cookie as a form of exploitation and consumption, maintained even as the black baker witnesses the consumption. Sidney Mintz has already put us in the mindset of thinking of bodies as intimately connected to the making of comestible commodities; Wazana Tompkins furthers that reading here and in her study of trade cards by making the body itself explicitly edible.

[Katie Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much like Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, this book was much more race/gender/queer theory than food history. This should not be surprising given that the central argument of the book is that eating is central to the performative production of raced and gendered bodies in the 19th century, but I still would have liked to see a bit more discussion about the role of food.

Read Full Review: https://mybookbagblog.wordpress.com/2...

[Attiana Virella-fuentes · Rating 2 out of 5]

If it weren't the author's commitment to her argument and probably decades she must have spent researching this book, I would have given it one.

[Mills College Library]

394.12097 T662 2012