Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial

mandy — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

The introduction to Alimentary Tracts begins with a Salman Rushdie quote about peppercorns and includes the phrase “symbolic anthropophagy.” Similarly to the first two sentences, the remainder of the book would continue to intrigue and baffle me.

Alimentary Tracts consists of four long chapters entitled “Disgust: Food, Filth, and Anglo-Indian Flesh in 1857”; “Abstinence: Manifestos on Meat and Masculinity”; “Dearth: Figures of Famine”; and “Appetite: Spices Redux,” and one short final chapter, “Remains: A Coda.” The style of writing is admittedly dense, like an over-rich chocolate cake. And at times the meaning seems to be lost in the thickness of the form.

More simply, overall, Roy questions what is eaten, and what or who is involved in the process of cooking, sharing, and ingesting. She provides an analytical investigation of the “gastropolitics and gastropoetics.” Alimentary Tracts essentially asks how aspects of food politics (such as famine) impact identity and history in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Roy argues that “who eats and with whom, who starves, and what is rejected as food are fundamental to colonial and postcolonial making – and unmaking.”

In discussing famine, Roy brings attention to questions of equity and access. In the first chapter Roy provides greater context to Gandhi’s famous protest of the salt tax in India. She also looks at the issue of pollution for high-class Hindu males in food as interlinked to concepts of sex. And, in subsequent chapters, she discusses Mahasweta Devi’s coverage of famine in her short stories and novels.

In chapter two, she discusses Gandhi’s experiments with truth, eating, and abstinence. Humans today have certainly come a long way in acceptance of organic, local, vegan cuisines when compared to when Gandhi first went to England. At that time, open defiance of Hindu traditions were seen as civilized; eating meat and drinking alcohol was just one aspect of the norm.

I found the chapter focusing on appetite to smoothly flow the best. Roy traces the evolution of the term curry, an invention of Anglo-Indians in India, rather than an appropriate description of the various styles of cooking and spices that go into Indian food. Incorporating analysis of cookbooks and Indian writers, she weaves together what seems initially to be a strange combination of concepts.

Its easy to imagine excerpts of this text in a reader on South Asian studies, food politics, literary criticism or cultural criticism; it is nothing close to a cookbook and isn’t meant for light reading. In her introduction, Roy states that the alimentary tracts of colonial and postcolonial India contain lessons for students of literary, feminist, cultural, and area studies. Though the text can be painfully difficult to wade through, that is because it contains much substance.

Written by: Lakshmi Eassey, April 1st 2011

The Rey Chow Reader

emily — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Edited by Paul Bowman

Columbia University Press

Not many theorists would re-imagine Jane Eyre as a Maoist. However, postcolonial thinker Rey Chow does and with great aplomb. Furthermore, it's not in the context of English literature in which Chow invokes the fictional heroine, but rather the issue of Orientalism in today's academia. According to Chow, the Maoist Jane Eyre is a romantic and a self-styled victim that is embodied in the non-native scholar of East Asian studies who bemoans the loss of cultural “authenticity” in an increasingly globalised world. Chow's deft and even fanciful portrayal of the latter-day Orientalist that demonstrates her creative ingenuity and unconventional analytical mind is evident throughout the collection of her essays, The Rey Chow Reader, edited by Paul Bowman.

These qualities are important in the primary themes tackled in her writings—sexuality, racism, and postcolonialism. In the post-Edward Said world, the Orientalism of yore is not only outmoded but a disgrace to the Western academic code of practice, but Chow is perceptive to detect the more subtle Orientalisms she finds still pervasive in the academy, particularly in East Asian studies in Western institutions. Not only are academics (and often highly respected icons; Julia Kristeva for one) safe from Chow's relentless critique of latter day Orientalism, the works and words of art house film-makers Zhang Yimou and Bernado Bertolucci also go under her microscopic scrutinising gaze.

She is also self-aware of her own position in the ivory tower that she turns this gaze towards herself in an essay about her early career in academia; scholars from the former colonial frontier during the dissolution of the British empire such as herself (Chow hails from Hong Kong) were seduced by the imagined prestige of English literature that rendered Chinese writing less superior and intellectually legitimate. Chow's essay on the postcolonial-ised scholar is a subdued call to arms for the reclamation of one's own scholarship and by effect, cultural identity, even if one cannot readily give up the tools fashioned by the master.

It becomes clear that Chow is also deeply political. 'Seeing is Destroying' charts the changes in the US discourse of war since the devastating bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to today's brutality of war made sophisticated. These historical observations are perhaps nothing new, however, her concept of the target has chilling resonance of the primordial hunt. As the target in the hunt for America's national Other, first Japan, then the USSR, and now the shadowy figure of the Muslim terrorist, it is reduced to an object on which the trigger is on perpetual threat mode. What links 'Seeing is Destroying' with most of Chow's essays is visuality and the continued technological advancements that make the act of seeing increasingly powerful and more instrumental in xenophobic and sexist control.

Chow's tentacle-like approach to a diversity of disciplines that probes into every crevice of detail promises a thrilling experience and an inspiration to younger scholars of postcolonialism like myself. Perhaps the level of microscopic detail that Chow magnifies throughout her merciless analyses on Orientalism in film and her idiosyncrantic salad-bowl approach to theory may not appeal to everyone, but Chow has certainly created a fan in me.

Written by: Alicia Izharuddin, October 29th 2010

postcolonial theory

Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial

The Rey Chow Reader