Sheds light on contemporary "foodie" culture's vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism and race privilege

Winner of the 2013 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize presented by the American Studies Association
Winner of the 2013 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award
Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series

The act of eating is both erotic and violent, as one wholly consumes the object being eaten. At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists outside her body. Racial Indigestion explores the links between food, visual and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States to reveal how eating produces political subjects by justifying the social discourses that create bodily meaning.

Combing through a visually stunning and rare archive of children’s literature, architectural history, domestic manuals, dietetic tracts, novels and advertising, Racial Indigestion tells the story of the consolidation of nationalist mythologies of whiteness via the erotic politics of consumption. Less a history of commodities than a history of eating itself, the book seeks to understand how eating became a political act, linked to appetite, vice, virtue, race and class inequality and, finally, the queer pleasures and pitfalls of a burgeoning commodity culture. In so doing, Racial Indigestion sheds light on contemporary “foodie” culture’s vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism and race privilege.

For more, visit the author's tumblr page: http://racialindigestion.tumblr.com

"Kyla Wazana Tompkins's study on eating in nineteenth-century America is mesmerizing. From the playful literary history of children's tales in the antebellum period to the tightly woven cultural analysis of chromo-lithographed trade cards for food products in the Gilded Age, Tompkins convincingly makes the case that eating as a social practice was inextricably tangled with the construction and performance of nineteenth-century American identities." - WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

"An intrepidly researched meditation on the assertion that 'eating is central to the performance production of raced and gendered bodies in the nineteenth century' (p. 7), Racial Indigestiondeserves an enthusiastic readership among scholars in fields ranging from American literary, cultural, and food studies to gender, sexuality, race, and performance theory." - New England Quarterly

"Five dense chapters, chronologically arranged, cover a great deal of ground....The best part of Racial Indigestionis a long final chapter on an archival trove of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century chromolithographed trade cards advertising a variety of food products. The cards are remarkable in the variety of racial actors and scenarios they showcase, and so, simply as an act of archival recovery alone, the chapter performs a most useful service. But Tompkins brings to these cards an analytic subtlety that is little short of dazzling. Refusing to read them as in any way self-evident, she draws attention to their embeddedness in the idioms of vaudeville, minstrelsy, carnival, and other performative traditions." - Journal of American Studies

"Highly ambitious and fascinating work." - Children's Literature Association Quarterly

"This text is one of the most theoretically groundbreaking and important 'food studies' texts to date." - H-Net Reviews

"Bold and brilliant." - Journal of American History

"Racial Indigestion provides a highly accessible and well theorized approach to tracing the intersecting resonances between the orality, alimentary, and eroticism of the mouth in literary representation. It will be of great interest to scholars of food studies, African-American studies, and nineteenth-century American literature." - Journal of American Culture

"Racial Indigestionis a subtle and wide-ranging study that will be of interest to scholars in nineteenth-century literature, critical race theory, American studies, food studies, and consumer cultures more generally. The originality and depth of the analysis ensures thatRacial Indigestionwill be a key reference work for years to come." - Black Cultural Studies

"The best moments in Racial Indigestion come not in the large, embracing statements of cultural analysis but in Tompkinss close and persuasive textual readings." - American Quarterly