The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature

(Paperback)

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The ubiquitous presence of food and hunger in Caribbean writingfrom folktales, fiction, and poetry to political and historical treatisessignals 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, Valrie 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 interrogatesincluding Patrick Chamoiseau, Suzanne Csaire, Aim Csaire, Maryse Cond, Edwidge Danticat, douard Glissant, Lafcadio Hearn, and Dany Laferrirebite 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.

Reviews

"The Tropics Bite Back is a brilliant and highly original work of scholarship from one of the outstanding voices in contemporary Francophone studies. Valrie 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

Author Bio

Valrie Loichot is associate professor of French and English and core faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University. She is also author of Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse.