Imperial Dietetics on Ivu'ivu

Hey! This article talked about Pacific Islanders!  That’s really exciting.  Okay, moment over.

It would be very easy to pair up sections of Tompkins's article with The People in the Trees, as she addresses many themes also central to this text:  imperialism, eating, bodies, sex, assimilation, exoticism, and many more.  For instance, one of the perplexing aspects of the experiences of protagonist, Dr. Perina, on the island is the conflict between his relationship with food compared with that of the natives.  Every item of consumption is foreign, if not exotic:  Spam, manama fruit (a fictional breadfruit type-thing that grows on a tree with scales), vuakas (a small monkey the islanders eat as delicacies), and, of course, the opa’ivu’eke (the magical turtle consumed when one reaches age 60 and subsequently achieves immortality). Furthermore, Dr. Perina’s encounters with the Ivu’ivans becomes sexually charged after his discovery of a pederastic initiation ritual.  While the island itself is not colonized, the neocolonial forces of global capitalism deplete the island of its every food source and then the bodies of its natives, and finally, Dr. Perina adopts dozens of the Ivu’ivuan children for what first appears to be for their education and assimilation, but end up victims of his sexual appetite, bringing full-circle Yanagihara’s allegory of imperialism.  

Since there are so many avenues to explore in this pairing, I might use this text as a way to challenge the students to develop the skills that they will need for essay writing, specifically in integrating a secondary source for their end of term research paper.  This assignment is, of course, for the same course (ENL 180, Univ. of California) for which they read my award-winning Norton Anthology last week (yes, future-me definitely won awards for that masterpiece).  In the class, I would then try an exercise in which they use their collective close reading skills to practice writing strong analytical paragraphs for their essays.

Here’s how it might work:  I’ll put a series of quotations from the primary text up on large sticky-note paper around the room, say 6-8 quotations for a 20-ish person class.  Then, after having read the Tompkins article, they can pair a quote from the secondary source that they feel can either support, complicate, expand, etc, the primary source quotation, and then with their classmates who also like that particular quote, work on crafting an analytical paragraph  on the large sticky-note using close readings and interpretation.  After the groups have written their paragraphs, we all walk around looking at the sticky-notes in a "gallery walk," marveling at their wonderful work.  For example, they might see this quote:

“She took the slippery bits of Spam from our palms, sometimes with her mouth (her puckering lips, wet and vaguely vaginal, kissed against me) and sometimes with the flat of her hand; she seemed not to use her fingers--and waited until she fell asleep flat on her back, all of us watching her by Tallent’s flashlight” (99).

And pair it with this one:

“In Graham’s story from the 1830s food and sex emerge as central themes in a premonitory fantasy  of imperial expansion.  Here commodity consumption and the desire for land serve as a catalytic desires for interactions across national, regional, and ethnic differences [...] Absorbing these alien others and “Americanizing them” is  a constant preoccupation in a nation that is both militarily aggressive and open to successive waves of immigration.”

And maybe they could talk about imperialism, or food, or the sexualization of the “foreign” body, or consumption of that body, or maybe her mouth...maybe they could talk about how her mouth is a vagina.  Maybe.

Carnal desires, both sexual and alimentary

Reading the chapter from Tompkins’s book – Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19^th Century – made me strangely hungry. I also couldn’t help but think of Hsuan Hsu’s lecture the other week on paleofiction and race. If wheat, as followers of Grahamite thought proclaim, makes people moral and balanced, what would they say about those who follow paleo diets or are gluten free today??? Are they simply masturbating ALL THE TIME?

But back to Thompkins, teaching, and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

A satirical brothel scene from 1784 via the British Museum. More party, boobs, and booze, less food.

I’d want to dig into the imperialism that Tompkins connects with food, the connections of “diet and racial supremacy,” as well as issues of gender and control (54). The role of women connected to food ties into my previous post about capitalism and prostitutes. Here, though, Tompkins explains Graham’s concerns with food and women, specifically the role of matron as producer of bread and thus sustainer of the domestic order (71). This matron figure contrasts with the girl whose “excessive lasciviousness” Graham describes just a bit strangely (79). She doesn’t eat right, so no amount of moral instruction could prevent her from “self-pollution” and trying to get with the dudes. In other words, excessive sexuality is a threat to this moral code.

Let’s say we’re still in my upper division undergrad course on erotic literature from the 1600s to today. Since the class would be looking at texts from the 19th-century, just as Tompkins does, I’d use her ideas to influence a class devoted to food and erotica. In preparation for class I’d ask students to find one or two instances of food in the text and how they see it being used. They could pick from Memoirs or one of the other books we would have read by then.

I’d then put students in pairs or groups of 3 (depending on class size) and have them share what they came in with to each other. We’d then attempt to classify the different usages of food in the texts and see if there was any pattern in terms of time or space. Since I don’t have that syllabus written (yet), here are some examples from Memoirs:

• PLOT DEVICE: When Fanny sees Charles, the love of her life, for the first time, he’s sleeping off a night of drinking in the brothel’s parlor. Next to him “still remain’d the punch-bowl and glasses, strow’d about in their usual disorder after a drunken revel” (34). Here drink equals negative excess/decadence, but is also the means through which Fanny meets the man she will eventually marry. And it allows her to escape Mrs. Brown’s awful brothel.
• METAPHORIC: Fanny talks about “that store bag of nature’s prime sweets” when feeling up one of her many lovers as well as the “balsamic sweets” of ejaculate during sex with Charles (83, 42). The dizzying round of sex Fanny and Charles have their first day together is also described as a “feast” (43).

There are also lots of dinners in the text, though they are served by others and never made by Fanny. She is not a bread-maker or baker. Breakfast, if mentioned, is chocolate. Clearly she is a lady of excess whose passions are inflamed, perhaps in part by the exotic foods she eats.

After looking at these usages in the texts themselves, class would conclude with a broader discussion of the relationship between food, sex, and power, connecting the texts we’d read through this lens of eating.

I don’t think I would necessarily have the students read this selection, but would pull out some of Tompkins examples to share with them. If it was a grad seminar, they’d get the chapter paired with a 19th-century text. If I was feeling clever, I'd make sure people had brought food to share so that we weren't all starving by end of class.

Borders, Toxins, and the Refugee Condition

I really enjoyed the Chen article and especially like the ways in which it brings together discourses on environmental justice, critical race studies, queer theory, and biopolitics. Were I to teach it, I would certainly use it in a lesson on a primary text related more directly to toxicity than By the Sea. Gain, by Richard Powers, is in my experience many people’s go-to text regarding toxicity, the environment, and global/transnational capitalism, and would probably work nicely in this case (it could also lend itself to a discussion of whiteness re: toxicity), but I’m sure there are many other texts that I’ve not yet encountered that would work well, or even better, in combination with the article. For the purposes of this blog post, however, let’s suspend disbelief and pretend that I’m teaching an upper-level undergraduate class for which I have had my students read By the Sea, Chen’s “Toxic Animacies,” and the Tompkins chapter on “Graham’s Imperial Dietetics.”

I would focus my class on going through Chen’s article and using it to explicate the basic strands of queer, environmental, and race criticisms upon which it expands. After that, I would bring in By the Sea to start a discussion on borders, biopolitics, and toxicity. Introducing the idea of thinking through a possible connection between refugees and toxins, I would break the class up into groups and assign each group a coupling of a quote from the novel and a quote from a critical essay to analyze.

Group #1

When Latif asks Saleh about why he chose not to reveal that he speaks English to the immigrations officers, Latif says that without English, “You’re just a condition, without even a story” (Gurnah 143). Chen’s conclusion states, “Unlike viruses, toxins are not so very containable or quarantinable; they are better thought of as conditions with effects, bringing their own affects and animacies to bear on lives and nonlives” (Chen 281-2). Gurnah and Chen are using the word “condition” in different ways, but what similarities can we read into them? How does Saleh’s lack of a backstory in the eyes of the British government affect his subjectivity, his animacy? What happens when the British government does “quarantine” refugees in detainment centers?

Group #2

For this group I would combine the above quote from Chen with the line that the airport immigration officer, Kevin Edelman, tells Saleh, even though he thinks Saleh doesn’t understand: “People like you come pouring in here without any thought of the damage they cause” (Gurnah 12). What damage does the British state think that refugees can cause; what will Saleh’s effects on the British nation be?

Group #3

Chen’s essay opens with the observation that “figures of toxicity have moved well beyond their specific range of biological attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds while retaining their affective ties to vulnerability and repulsion” (Chen 266). When Saleh is first placed in a homestay in the small seaside town in England in which the present tense of the novel is set (he later is given his own apartment), he is repulsed by the guest room and ends up sleeping on a towel on the floor: “I daren’t even sit on [the bed] out of an irrational fear of contamination, not just fear of disease but of some inner pollution. … sitting on the floor of that dusty overcrowded room, unable to think about anything else except my own worthlessness” (Gurnah 56-7). Remember the very last line of the book, when Saleh visits Latif in London and worries about the messy state of Latif’s apartment, wondering whether he’ll have clean sheets: “I had Alfonso’s towel with me if the worst came to the worst” (245). How can we use Chen’s analysis of toxicity to think about these instances of repulsion, these worries of contamination? What do these show us about Saleh’s experience as a subject? What effects does British culture or the British state (his condition, rather than reading Saleh as a condition) have on him?

Group #4

While being questioned by Kevin Edelman, Saleh reflects on why the British government has offered asylum to Zanzibaris: “It was a cheap way of showing stern disapproval, and there weren’t too many of us” (Gurnah 10). In her article, Tompkins discusses how 

in Alcott’s vision the body/home is thus ever susceptible to collapse and/or pollution and ever in need of shoring up against the threat from without. … However much the civilized body, domicile, and nation seek to seal themselves off from the exteriority of nature, they can never wholly succeed without some impossible act of sewing up the mouth and orifices, without becoming entirely isolate. This would, of course, mean death. (Tompkins 76)

If we think of refugees as metaphorical toxins entering the British nation, how can we use Tompkins’s assessment of the impossibility of complete isolation to explain what Saleh sees as the British rationale for offering Zanzibaris asylum?

I’d then have each group present their ideas and have a brief class discussion to synthesize these readings and think about the questions of national borders, imperialism, biopolitics, and the subjectivity of refugees in By the Sea.

(P.S. Here’s a fun fact, because I can’t resist talking about my alma mater: In the early 1840s, Oberlin College strictly enforced the Graham diet in its dining halls.)