Alimentary Tracts

Roy Parama Roy

Description

In Alimentary Tracts Parama Roy argues that who eats and with whom, who starves, and what is rejected as food are questions fundamental to empire, decolonization, and globalization. In crucial ways, she suggests, colonialism reconfigured the sensorium of colonizer and colonized, generating novel experiences of desire, taste, and appetite as well as new technologies of the embodied self. For colonizers, Indian nationalists, diasporic persons, and others in the colonial and postcolonial world orders, the alimentary tract functioned as an important corporeal, psychoaffective, and ethicopolitical contact zone, in which questions of identification, desire, difference, and responsibility were staged.Interpreting texts that have addressed cooking, dining, taste, hungers, excesses, and aversions in South Asia and its diaspora since the mid-nineteenth century, Roy relates historical events and literary figures to tropes of disgust, abstention, dearth, and appetite. She analyzes the fears of pollution and deprivation conveyed in British accounts of the so-called Mutiny of 1857, complicates understandings of Mohandas K. Gandhi's vegetarianism, examines the "famine fictions" of the novelist-actor Mahasweta Devi, and reflects on the diasporic cookbooks and screen performances of Madhur Jaffrey. This account of richly visceral global modernity furnishes readers with a new idiom for understanding historical action and cultural transformation.

Sujets

• Histoire
• South Asia
• 20th century
• History of Asia
• India

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 08 novembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822393146
• Langue: English

Extrait

AlimentaryTracts

.

next wave

new directions

in women’s studies

a series edited by

inderpal grewal,

caren kaplan, and

robyn wiegman

AlimentaryTracts

.

appetites, aversions,

and the postcolonial

Parama Roy

dukeuniversity press 9 D U R H A M A N D L O N D O N ≤≠∞≠

∫2010 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

of America on acid-free paper$

Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan

Typeset in Quadraat and Quadraat

Sans by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data appear on the

last printed page of this book.

in memory of

RamolaRoy

and

AmalenduRoy

1. 2. 3. 4.

Acknowledgmentsix

Contents

Introduction 1 Disgust: Food, Filth, and Anglo-Indian Flesh in 1857 31 Abstinence: Manifestos on Meat and Masculinity 75 Dearth: Figures of Famine 116 Appetite: Spices Redux 154 Remains: A Coda 191

Notes195 SelectBibliography241 Index269

.

Acknowledgments

.

This book has been a long time in the making, and whatever thanks I can render at this point to the colleagues, friends, and institutions who have aided me over the course of its prolonged gestation are necessarily inade- quate. As always, my most acute interlocutors have been Carole-Anne Tyler and Sandhya Shetty; I am grateful to them for their gifts of rigor and imagination. I am grateful as well to Sangeeta Ray and Ajay Skaria, who read the manuscript in its entirety with a remarkable mixture of incisive- ness and generosity. Anjali Arondekar and a second, anonymous reader for Duke University Press gave it the kind of meticulous scrutiny that proved immensely useful in defining the stakes of the project. I have also benefited immeasurably from the critical stimulus provided by a host of other scholars: Lalitha Gopalan, Bishnu Ghosh, Sudipta Sen, Lawrence Cohen, Catherine Robson, Sukanya Banerjee, Caren Kaplan, Piya Chatter- jee, Inderpal Grewal, Raka Ray, Amitav Ghosh, Barbara Metcalf, Vasudha Dalmia, Bhaskar Sarkar, Jenny Sharpe, Frances Hasso, the late Meenakshi Mukherjee, Maria Couto, Margie Ferguson, Fran Dolan, Liz Constable, Geeta Patel, Jennifer Brody, Suad Joseph, Omnia El-Shakry, Karl Britto, Minoo Moallem, and Marisol Cortez. For their unsurpassed collegiality I am deeply appreciative of Kim Devlin, Deborah Willis, George Haggerty, Steve Axelrod, Carole Fabricant, Georg Gugelberger, Katherine Kinney, and Joe Childers, my erstwhile colleagues at the University of California, Riverside. Versions of several chapters of this book were presented atucBerke- ley,ucla,ucIrvine,ucSanta Barbara,ucSanta Cruz,ucRiverside,uc Davis, the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin, Mil-