Devouring cultures : perspectives on food, power, and identity from the Zombie Apocalypse to Downton Abbey / edited by Cammie M. Sublette and Jennifer Martin.
"Funded in part by The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts"--Page 4 of cover. Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-217) and index.
Contents:
Introduction : American self-fashioning and culinary consumption -- part 1. Eating out : how restaurants shape cultural identity -- 1. "Between bolted beef and bolted pudding" : Boston's eating houses and nineteenth-century social and cultural change / Kelly Erby -- 2. Nervous kitchens : consuming sentimentality narratives and black-white intimacy at a Chicago hot dog stand / Jessica Kenyatta Walker -- 3. A pedagogy of dining out : learning to consume culture / Joe Marshall Hardin -- Part 2 . Consuming literature : food and identity in writing -- 4. Hunger pains : appetite and racial longing in Stealing Buddha's dinner / Laura Anh Williams -- 5. Consuming American consumerism in The road / Jennifer Martin -- 6. From Aunt Jemima to Aunt Marthy : commodifying the kitchen cook and undermining white authority in Incidents in the life of a slave girl / Krystal McMillen -- Part 3. Consuming popular culture : food identity defined in television and movies -- 7. Scenes from the dialogic kitchen : "thinking culture dialogically" in Italian American narratives / James Cianciola -- 8. Consuming pleasures : nineteenth-century cookery as narrative structure in Downton Abbey / Lindsy Lawrence -- 9. Pie as nostalgia : what one food symbolizes for every generation of Americans / Rachel S. Hawley -- 10. The last Twinkie in the universe : culinary hedonism and nostalgia in zombie films / Cammie M. Sublette.
Summary:
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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.