Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century

Kyla Wazana Tompkins's award-winning Racial Indigestion is a bold and brilliant study of American literature and “eating culture.” Demonstrating the exciting potential of what she terms “critical eating studies”—a new approach that links food studies to body theory (p. 2)—Tompkins remaps the complexities of racial formation in the United States. Students of American literature will be surprised to learn in Racial Indigestion how the kitchen produced fictions of racial difference in ways that complicated nation building, as well as how Sylvester Graham's bread treatises contributed to configurations of whiteness and racial supremacy as much as Samuel Morton's collections of skulls and his influential Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Ægyptiaca (1844) did. As the title suggests, Racial Indigestion affirms the key role of the image...