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.