Alimentary Tracts : Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial, Paperback by ...

Description: Alimentary Tracts : Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial, Paperback by Roy, Parama, ISBN 0822348020, ISBN-13 9780822348023, Brand New, Free shipping in the US In Alimentary Tracts Parama Roy argues that who eats and with whom, who starves, and what is rejected as food are questions fundamental to empire, decolonization, and globalization. In crucial ways, she suggests, colonialism reconfigured the sensorium of colonizer and colonized, generating novel experiences of desire, taste, and appetite as well as new technologies of the embodied self. For colonizers, Indian nationalists, cliasporic persons, and others in the colonial and postcolonial world orders, the alimentary tract functioned as an important corporeal, psychoaffective, and ethicopolitical contract zone, in which questions of identification, desire, difference, and responsibility were staged. Interpreting texts that have addressed cooking, dining, taste, hungers, excesses, and aversions in South Asia and its diaspora since the mid-nineteenth century, Roy relates historical events and literary figures to tropes of appetite, abstention, dearth, and disgust. She analyzes the fears of pollution and deprivation conveyed in British accounts of the so-called Mutiny of 1857, complicates understandings of Mohandas K. Gandhi's vegetarianism, examines the "famine fictions" of the novelist-actor Mahasweta Devi, and reflects on the diasporic cookbooks and screen performances of Madhur Jaffrey, This account of richly visceral global modernity furnishes readers with a new idiom for understanding historical action and cultural transformation. "While Swami Vivekananda suggested that Indians needed `beef, biceps, and Bhagyadgita' to overthrow the British, Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated that vegetarianism, abstinence, and nonviolent protest were the more appropriate practices for a spiritualized Indian national movement. By revealing the agency of gastropoetics and gastropolitics throughout modern South Asian history, Parama Roy brilliantly interrogates disgust, abstinence, dearth, and appetite as `biomoral' categories that transformed traditional vectors of cultural analysis and social action. Roy's book is, unsurprisingly, great food for thought. It yields exquisite morsels alongside an intellectual savoring of all those gastronomic staples that resonate throughout history and literature. Did chapatis leaven the Mutiny? How did salt marinate the satyagraha? And why does the diaspora crave chutney and spices?" Srinivas Aravamudan, author of Tropicopolitans and Guru Englsih "This splendid book uses ideas about food, fasting, and famine to explore the Indian colonial sensorium in a truly original manner, It should be of great interest to historians of colonialism, of cuisine, and of the affective practices through which the colony---and the postcolony---produce their effects. It is beautifully and forcefully written, thus itself a sensory bonus for the reader." Arjun Appadurai, New York University

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