Time: 6:00 - 8:00pm
Venue: Room G34 (Ground Floor), Senate House, Malet Street, WC1E 7HU
Digesting Texts: Comparative Approaches to Food
ROUNDTABLE AND DISCUSSION led by Ruth Cruickshank (Royal Holloway) with David Lunn (KCL) and Mathelinda Nabugodi (UCL)
Both food and language are essential to human survival, but they also serve complex cultural, political and psychological functions and affect how we try to make sense of the world, others and ourselves. Food is also an indispensable tool for writers, providing structure, symbolism, the premise for action and characterization. Yet food and language are also ambivalent, bound up with leftover meanings, tensions and experiences. So, beyond authorial intentions, representations of food carry traces of meanings and of psychological experiences and are vectors for gender, class and ethnic power relations as well as political, ideological and metaphysical discourses.
Panelists will begin by providing perspectives from different periods, geographies and genres, spanning the potential of French critical leftovers, Dalit scraps in Hindi fiction and Shelley’s ‘vegetable diet’ and gestural language (abstracts below).
These approaches will inform the questions we would like everyone to consider in relation to their own research interests and cultural framework so that we can enjoy a really productive discussion after these papers.
How can exploring representations of food provide new understandings of representational practice?
How can exploring representations of food provide new understandings of cultural exchange and difference?
What theoretical approaches using or legible through food can be used in comparative criticism?
We all eat and speak, so we all have something to bring to the table!
Refreshments, will, of course, be served…
VENUE
Room G34 (Ground Floor)
Senate House, South Block
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU
To register, please visit:
http://events.sas.ac.uk/imlr/events/
LINKS is a collaboration between London institutions involved in teaching and research in comparative literary studies, to promote dialogue and cooperation. Participating institutions include University College London, King’s, Goldsmiths, Queen Mary, SOAS, Birkbeck and Royal Holloway.
ABSTRACTS
Ruth Cruickshank, Royal Holloway
(Post)Structuralism’s Leftovers: Re-thinking and Re-reading Eating
Food is necessary to human and animal life. But for humans, food always carries a surcharge of meaning, and examining thought that engages with food can reveal unthought remainders bespeaking cultural change. Eating is key to Lévi-Strauss’ quest to identify how human life is structured. Yet he also creates new myths around food which articulate nostalgia for certainty whilst also betraying leftovers of barbarism, ambivalence and co-implication. Other thinkers offer ways to re-think these leftovers. Derrida’s notion of the trace invites the idea of the leftover as a critical figure supplementing the auto-critique intrinsic in language. Deconstructive readings identify how binary oppositions leave things out and invite considerations of textual consumption as akin to the processes of digestion and incorporation, to the impossibility of identifying what is incorporated and what slips away. For Lacan the symptom is an inescapable leftover that comes back as an imperfectly expressed symptom. So if structuralists unintentionally elide historical, cultural and psychological traces always already attached to food, the analysis of their work via Lacan and Derrida demonstrates how - by design or by omission - intellectual and aesthetic developments articulate leftovers which offer insight into representational practices and consumption. What is more, re-reading thinking about eating opens up new ways of reading literary texts.
David Lunn (King’s College London)
Fit Panis Hominum: Caste, Class, Gods and Table Scraps in Hindi (Dalit) Literature
“Eating raw pig’s meat is such an uncivilized and repulsive thing. Our hands and mouths used to be covered with fat…Thinking about it now makes me nauseous.” Surajpal Chauhan’s revulsion in his autobiography Tiraskrit (Anubhav Prakashan, 2002) at the joy with which he and other members of his Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) community used to consume a pig on a festival occasion highlights well the centrality of food to the aesthetics and rhetoric of contemporary Dalit literature. The re-appropriation and reconditioning of symbols otherwise considered dirty or disgusting to purposes of affirmation and uplift has been at the centre of debates in Hindi literature over the past two decades as to the literary merit of such raw retellings of dirt, depravation, and Dalit-hood. The pig symbol is also found in Omprakash Valmiki’s 1997 autobiography Joothan (Radhakrishna Prakashan), with the title itself drawing our attention to the means of subsistence of the author and his community: here referring to the table scraps or leftovers traditionally distributed to Dalits after high-caste wedding feasts. This presentation will explore the representations of food in the context of a religiously ordered ritual society, along spectrums of purity–impurity and “twice born”–“untouchable”. The question of holiness, and the image of transubstantiation enclosed in the quotation from Aquinas’ liturgy, come to the fore, especially when we consider Gandhi’s earlier renaming of the untouchables of India as harijan, or “children of god”, a name long since dismissively cast aside by the Dalit community. Food and hunger; opportunity and exclusion; oppression and liberation; holiness and hypocrisy—these are just some of the binaries brought to light through food’s centrality to these narratives.
Mathelinda Nabugodi, UCL
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Vegetable Diet’ and the Gestural Language of Prometheus Unbound.
Percy Bysshe Shelley converted to vegetarianism at a young age, and he made several attempts to promote the ‘vegetable diet’ to a wider public. Vegetarianism is important to the apocalyptic vision of Shelley’s first long poem, Queen Mab (1813), where flesh-eating is related to the fallen state of man. In the notes to this poem Shelley cites his friend John Frank Newton’s allegorical interpretation of the Promethean myth. According to Newton, Prometheus theft of fire from the gods signifies its adaptation for ‘culinary purposes’ which made it possible to eat meat. The eagle pecking at Prometheus’ liver stands for the corruption of the human body caused by a carnivorous diet. Adopting a vegetarian diet is a way to counteract Prometheus’ curse and return our bodies to their natural condition; thus, Shelley terms his treatise on vegetarianism ‘A Vindication of the Natural Diet.’ However, for Shelley vegetarianism was not only about personal health. In addition to Newton, Shelley was inspired by Joseph Ritson, who put a clearly political edge to vegetarianism: killing animals brutalises men and makes them willing to kill one another. This is proven by economics: since the high production costs of meat contribute to the unequal distribution of resources in society, meat-eating is directly linked to political oppression and social inequality. After surveying some of the personal and political aspects of Shelley’s commitment to a vegetable diet, I suggest that we approach Shelley’s vegetarianism as a gestural language. This will, in turn, help us read how bodies are represented in Shelley’s own version of the Promethean myth in his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820).
