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This book examines how modern US writers used the changing geographies, regimens, and technologies of modern food to reimagine racial classification and to question its relationship to the mutable body. By challenging a cultural ideal of purity, this literature proposes that racial whiteness is perhaps the most artificial color of them all.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: "Purple Fluid, Carbon-Charged": Jean Toomer's Mutable Materials
- Chapter 2: Genius in the Raw: The Schuyler Family and the Modern Mulatta
- Chapter 3: Eating Like a Local: Stein, Hemingway, and the Stakes of Terroir
- Chapter 4: "A Beaker Full of the Warm South": The Fitzgeralds and Mediterranean Infusions
- Chapter 5: The Monstropolous Beast: Animacy and Industry in Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West
- Notes
- Index
About the author
Catherine Keyser is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and the author of Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture (Rutgers University Press 2010).
Summary
This book examines how modern US writers used the changing geographies, regimens, and technologies of modern food to reimagine racial classification and to question its relationship to the mutable body. By challenging a cultural ideal of purity, this literature proposes that racial whiteness is perhaps the most artificial color of them all.
Additional text
In Artificial Color, Catherine Keyser has produced a book that will quickly become a pivotal text in critical eating studies. It makes clear how an understanding of the alimentary intimacies in writings by Fitzgerald, Toomer, Schuyler, Stein, Hurston, West, and Hemingway oblige us to think about food's racial embodiment. With its elegant readings of modern US narrative literature on both sides of the color line, Keyser asks us to think about how food can be an imaginative vehicle for racial transformations. This isn't simply a book about eating but about how a practice of reading that centers food can go a long way in talking about mutability of the body in its gendered and racialized forms.
