The Tropics Bite Back
Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature
The surprising relationships between food and starvation and the practice of literary cannibalism
The Tropics Bite Back traces the evolution of the Caribbean response to the colonial gaze (or rather the colonial mouth) from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Valérie Loichot employs cross-disciplinary methods to rethink notions of race and literary influence by providing a fresh perspective on forms of consumption both metaphorical and material.
"The Tropics Bite Back is a brilliant and highly original work of scholarship from one of the outstanding voices in contemporary Francophone studies. Valérie Loichot identifies cannibalism as the master trope of Antillean Literature, and goes on in this mature and insightful book to explore and analyze its various manifestations in a series of penetrating and novel readings. Exciting and profound, the book is both engaged and engaging."—Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University
The ubiquitous presence of food and hunger in Caribbean writing—from folktales, fiction, and poetry to political and historical treatises—signals the traumas that have marked the Caribbean from the Middle Passage to the present day. The Tropics Bite Back traces the evolution of the Caribbean response to the colonial gaze (or rather the colonial mouth) from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Unlike previous scholars, Valérie Loichot does not read food simply as a cultural trope. Instead, she is interested in literary cannibalism, which she interprets in parallel with theories of relation and creolization.
For Loichot, “the culinary” is an abstract mode of resistance and cultural production. The Francophone and Anglophone authors whose works she interrogates—including Patrick Chamoiseau, Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, Édouard Glissant, Lafcadio Hearn, and Dany Laferrière—“bite back” at the controlling images of the cannibal, the starved and starving, the cunning cook, and the sexualized octoroon with the ultimate goal of constructing humanity through structural, literal, or allegorical acts of ingesting, cooking, and eating.
The Tropics Bite Back employs cross-disciplinary methods to rethink notions of race and literary influence by providing a fresh perspective on forms of consumption both metaphorical and material.
Awards
Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies from the Modern Language Association
The Tropics Bite Back is a brilliant and highly original work of scholarship from one of the outstanding voices in contemporary Francophone studies. Valérie Loichot identifies cannibalism as the master trope of Antillean Literature, and goes on in this mature and insightful book to explore and analyze its various manifestations in a series of penetrating and novel readings. Exciting and profound, the book is both engaged and engaging.
Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University
Loichot has produced a novel, significant study of food and hunger in the Caribbean. She artfully moves beyond the expected critiques of food as a cultural trope and interrogates literary cannibalism within the areas of Creolization and relation. All scholars doing research on Caribbean culture and literature should read and critically align this work with past and present associations of food and consumption in the Caribbean.
Choice
Loichot has produced a novel, significant study of food and hunger in the Caribbean. She artfully moves beyond the expected critiques of food as a cultural trope and interrogates literary cannibalism within the areas of Creolization and relation. All scholars doing research on Caribbean culture and literature should read and critically align this work with past and present associations of food and consumption in the Caribbean.
CHOICE
The central intellectual contribution of The Tropics Bite Back is found in the way it parses out the nuances of the food metaphor in Caribbean writing.
College Literature
Contents
Introduction: The Cannibal and the Edible
1. From Gumbo to Masala: Édouard Glissant’s Creolization in the Circum-Caribbean
2. Not Just Hunger: Patrick Chamoiseau and Aimé Césaire
3. Kitchen Narrative: Food and Exile in Edwidge Danticat and Gisèle Pineau
4. Sexual Traps: Dany Laferrière and Gisèle Pineau
5. Literary Cannibals: Suzanne Césaire and Maryse Condé
Afterword: Can Hunger Speak?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
