Introduction: Food in Multi-Ethnic Literatures

The language of food fills the pages of multi-ethnic literatures of the United States. Food tropes, metaphors, and images serve as figures of speech which depict celebrations of families and communities, portray identity crises, create usable histories to establish ancestral connections, subvert ideology and practices of assimilation, and critique global capitalism. In the United States, relationships between food and ethnicity bear historical, social, cultural, economic, political, and psychological significance, in other words, ethnic identity formations have been shaped by experiences of food productions and services, culinary creativities, appetites, desires, hunger, and even vomit, This special issue of MELUS presents seven essays that centralize the multivalent meaning of food in various ethnic literary traditions, such as African American, Arab American, Asian American, Italian American, and Caribbean writing. Until recently, there had been little work done on the subject of food and American culture. The most celebrated writer has been M. F. K. Fisher, whose articles and personal essays on cooking are among the best literary renditions of food. A number of essay collections that have been published since the late 1980s, including Literary Gastronomy (1988), edited by David Bevan, Cooking by the Book: Food in Literature and Culture (1989), edited by Mary Anne Schofield, Gian-Paolo Biasin's The Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel (1993), Susanne Skubal's Word of Mouth: Food and Fiction after Freud (2002), and Denise Gigante's Taste: A laterary History (2005), are single-author volumes that seriously consider the role that food plays in literature. None of these books explore the role that food and foodways play in ethnic American literature, however. Recently a few books have focused on the relationships between food and ethnic literatures and cultures, and each of them deals with a single ethnicity, such as Doris Witt's Black Hunger: Food and the Polilics of U.S. Identity (1999), Andrew Warnes' Hunger Overcome? Food and Resistance in Twenteeth-Century African American Literature (2004), and Jennifer Ann Ho's Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (2005). Two journals, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, edited by Dara Goldstein, and Alimentum: The Literature of Food, edited by Paulette Licitra and Peter Selgin, have appeared; these journals consider the diversity of American cuisine and its impact on changing notions of American culture. As demands for assimilation and inculcation of ethnic inferiority often impact the ethnic individual's alimentary desires, so does the restoration of ethnic dignity and pride operate through culinary enjoyment. In literature we have met many characters who spurn their ethnicities through disavowal of ethnic foodways. This particular expression of self-loathing is often engendered by the racist culture that degrades ethnic foodways as filthy and unhealthful, and the association with filth predictably gestures toward immorality. An exploration of foodways in ethnic American literature reveals much about the way cultural superiority and inferiority have been measured by native and ethnic groups. It is hard today to think that eating spaghetti was once considered to be downright uncouth, but a quick look at an article that appeared in the April 1897 Arena magazine by Frederick O, Bushee of South End House, a Boston settlement house similar to Jane Addams' Hull House, shows us how Italian foodways were considered un-American: The dinner of the ordinary Italian is made up largely of macaroni, French or Italian bread, and usually some meat and potato. That form of flour preparation known as spaghetti is the most frequently used. This is boiled whole and served as a first course. The Italian experiences no difficulty in eating this slippery food, for he merely sucks it into his mouth from his fork in a very unconventional if not elegant manner. …