Devouring cultures
Subtitle: perspectives on food, power, and identity from the Zombie Apocalypse to Downton Abbey
By: edited by Cammie M. Sublette and Jennifer Martin
Series: Food and foodways; Food and foodways (Fayetteville, Ark.)
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Published: 2016
Place of publication: Fayetteville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 230
ISBN-13: 9781610755771; 9781557286918
Copyright date: 2016
Subjects: Food on television; Television broadcasting; Social aspects; PSYCHOLOGY; Social Psychology; SOCIAL SCIENCE; General
Description: Devouring Cultures brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines including media studies, rhetoric, gender studies, philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, film criticism, race theory, history, and linguistics to examine the ways food signifies both culture and identity. These scholars look for answers to intriguing questions: What does our choice of dining house say about our social class? Can restaurants teach us about a culture? How does food operate in Downton Abbey? How does food consumption in zombie apocalypse films and apocalyptic literature relate to contemporary food-chain crises and food nostalgia? What aspects of racial conflict, assimilation, and empowerment may be represented in restaurant culture and food choice? Restaurants, from their historical development to their modern role as surrogate kitchen, are studied as markers of gender, race, and social class, and also as forums for the exhibition of tensions or spaces where culture is learned through the language of food. Food, as it is portrayed in literature, movies, and television, is illuminated as a platform for cultural assimilation, a way for the oppressed to find agency, or even a marker for the end of a civilization. The essays in Devouring Cultures--despite having a rich mix of approaches--are united by each writer's deep exploration of how our choices about what we eat, where we eat, and with whom we eat are linked to identity and meaning.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Series Editor's Preface; Acknowledgments; Introduction: American Self-Fashioning and Culinary Consumption; Part 1. Eating Out; Chapter 1. "Between Bolted Beef and Bolted Pudding"; Chapter 2. Nervous Kitchens; Chapter 3. A Pedagogy of Dining Out; Part 2. Consuming Literature; Chapter 4. Hunger Pains; Chapter 5. Consuming American Consumerism in The Road; Chapter 6. From Aunt Jemima to Aunt Marthy; Part 3. Consuming Popular Culture; Chapter 7. Scenes from the Dialogic Kitchen; Chapter 8. Consuming Pleasures; Chapter 9. Pie as Nostalgia; Chapter 10. The Last Twinkiei n the Universe.