Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial

Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies

by Parama Roy

In Alimentary Tracts Parama Roy argues that who eats and with whom, who starves, and what is rejected as food are questions fundamental to empire, decolonization, and globalization. In crucial ways, she suggests, colonialism reconfigured the sensorium of colonizer and colonized, generating novel experiences of desire, taste, and appetite as well as new technologies of the embodied self. For colonizers, Indian nationalists, diasporic persons, and others in the colonial and postcolonial world orders, the alimentary tract functioned as an important corporeal, psychoaffective, and ethicopolitical contact zone, in which questions of identification, desire, difference, and responsibility were staged. Interpreting texts that have addressed cooking, dining, taste, hungers, excesses, and aversions in South Asia and its diaspora since the mid-nineteenth century, Roy relates historical events and literary figures to tropes of disgust, abstention, dearth, and appetite. She analyzes the fears of pollution and deprivation conveyed in British accounts of the so-called Mutiny of 1857, complicates understandings of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s vegetarianism, examines the “famine fictions” of the novelist-actor Mahasweta Devi, and reflects on the diasporic cookbooks and screen performances of Madhur Jaffrey. This account of richly visceral global modernity furnishes readers with a new idiom for understanding historical action and cultural transformation.

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction, Academic

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a gorgeously written and conceptually rich scholarly book about the ideologically, psychological, and inescapably visceral role of cooking, eating, and waste in the adumbration of the complex relationships between colonial subjects and imperial immigrants, postcolonies and the global diaspora. In each of her chapters, Roy shows consummate attention to the complexities of form (the revealing reversals and contradictions and enrichments of language), the strategies of persona (in Gandhi's memoirs, in Madhur Jaffrey's cookbooks), and the politics of mourning (the starvation of tribal India figured as a dying pterodactyl, Sara Suleri dreaming about saving her mother's dead flesh in her mouth). Her chapters are long yet well-structured, retaining both scope and momentum. Roy does a wonderful job thinking through the relationships between embodiment and appetite, renunciation and resistance, pollution and aggression in unexpected and thought-provoking ways. I really enjoyed reading it and learned a great deal from it.

[Swathi Muthu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is ambitious in its claims. It aims to look at the colonial and postcolonial encounters in terms of alimentation,hunger, and ingestion through various orifices. How can one look at colonial and postcolonial events of revolt, politics and famine through matters of diet and consumption? This book does that brilliantly. Parama Roy takes up four moments surrounding colonial/postcolonial encounters: the 1857 revolt, Gandhi's self-fashioning politics, the event of drought in the postcolonial state and the fantastic consumption(s) of the Indian diaspora. Through her analysis Roy establishes that bodily encounters along with tangible acts of consumption and starvation are significant factors in the identity making among both the dominant and dominated population.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roy intersects philosophical issues surrounding food with colonial and postcolonial relationships in South Asia. Her arguments are compelling, although she does not seem interested in forwarding strong claims (other than the obvious it is important to look at issues of eating as a way to understand relationships produced by colonialism), but rather raising issues, and asking interesting questions about what eating is and what it does. The book was a little dry in some parts, but overall, if you like to think about ethical issues surrounding food, I would recommend it.