Racial indigestion : eating bodies in the 19th century

Summary: "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."--Project Muse

Record details

ISBN: 0814770037
ISBN: 9780814770030
ISBN: 0814770029
ISBN: 9780814770023
ISBN: 0814738370
ISBN: 9780814738375
ISBN: 0814770053
ISBN: 9780814770054
Physical Description: 1 online resource (xiii, 275 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates) : illustrations (chiefly color)
remote
Publisher: New York : New York University Press, ©2012.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Formatted Contents Note:	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.
Source of Description Note:	Print version record.