Winner of the 2013 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association
Winner of the 2013 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award
Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series
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.
For more, visit the author's tumblr page: http://racialindigestion.tumblr.com
Kyla Wazana Tompkins is Professor and Chair of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo, and Professor of English at Pomona College. She is the author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century and managing editor of Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the winner of numerous book awards; in 2023, she won a James Beard Award for her essay “On Boba,” published in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century 1 Kitchen Insurrections 2 “She Made the Table a Snare to Them”: Sylvester Graham’s Imperial Dietetics 3 “Everything ’Cept Eat Us”: The Mouth as Political Organ in the Antebellum Novel 4 A Wholesome Girl: Addiction, Grahamite Dietetics, and Louisa May Alcott’s Rose Campbell Novels 5 “What’s De Use Talking ’Bout Dem ’Mendments?”: Trade Cards and Consumer Citizenship at the End of the Nineteenth Century Conclusion: Racial Indigestion Notes Bibliography Index About the Author An illustrated insert follows page
What People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
“A dazzlingly original and important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century American literature and culture. It brings together the still-emergent field of food studies with Americanist literary and cultural studies, but not in order to ‘apply’ a set food studies methodology to literature, or merely to trace a theme. Tompkins brings a new lens to bear on the cultural forms of a particular time and place, resulting in new insights into familiar texts but also in new ways of seeing archives that may not have seemed worth further exploration.”-Glenn Hendler,Fordham University
“Racial Indigestion is as creative as it is theoretically rigorous and archivally grounded. Tompkins sets forth a marvelous, fruitful array of analytic sites and clever juxtapositions, tracing the politics inherent in the decline of the hearth and the rise of stoves, reimagining the mouth as the window to an alimentary politics, and tracking the post-Reconstruction politics of trade cards. The connections she makes between eating and vernacular culture make the book satisfyingly literary, even as it is so clearly a stellar work of cultural studies.”-Elizabeth Freeman,author of Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
