num_pages: 275
description: 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 childrens 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 cultures vexed relationship to nativism nationalism and race privilege.
language: English
title: Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century
publisher: New York University Press