Tasting Difference - by Gitanjali G Shahani (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Tasting Difference examines early modern discourses of racial, cultural, and religious difference that emerged in the wake of contact with foreign peoples and foreign foods from across the globe. Gitanjali Shahani reimagines the contact zone between Western Europe and the global South in culinary terms, emphasizing the gut rather than the gaze in colonial encounters.

From household manuals that instructed English housewives how to use newly imported foodstuffs to "the spicèd Indian air" of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from the repurposing of Othello as an early modern pitchman for coffee in ballads to the performance of disgust in travel narratives, Shahani shows how early modern genres negotiated the allure and danger of foreign tastes.

Turning maxims such as "We are what we eat" on their head, Shahani asks how did we (the colonized subjects) become what you (the colonizing subjects) eat? How did we become alternately the object of fear and appetite, loathing and craving? Shahani takes us back several centuries to the process by which food came to be inscribed with racial character and the racial other came to be marked as edible, showing how the racializing of food began in an era well before chicken tikka masala and Balti cuisine. Bringing into conversation critical paradigms in early modern studies, food studies, and postcolonial studies, she argues that it is in the writing on food and eating that we see among the earliest configurations of racial difference, and it is experienced both as a different taste and as a taste of difference.

Review Quotes

Tasting Differences demonstrates that most experience other cultures and traditions through the mouth. By eating foods from distant lands, one can experience the other from the comfort of home. What humans accept and do not accept as palatable is a rich area of study, and Tasting Differences is an important contribution to the discussion.

Overall, the book contributes to developing conjectures on why certain communities and bodies cannot be incorporated into the body politic of the nation or the globe, together with explicating how this exclusion is affected by a complex network of taste and feelings that foodstuffs evoke.

About the Author

Gitanjali Shahani is Professor of English at San Francisco State University. She has been published in numerous journals, including Shakespeare, Shakespeare Studies, and The Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, and is editor of Emissaries in Early Modern Literature & Culture and Food and Literature.