Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (America and the Long 19th Century)
“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 Indigestionis 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 ofTime Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories"Racial Indigestion provides a highly accessible and well theorized approach to tracing the intersecting resonances between the orality, alimentary, and eroticism of the mouth in literary representation. It will be of great interest to scholars of food studies, African-American studies, and nineteenth-century American literature."-Journal of American Culture,"The best moments in Racial Indigestion come not in the large, embracing