Food Studies in Latin American Literature: Perspectives on the Gastronarrative ed. by Rocío del Águila and Vanesa Miseres

Abstract

Reviewed by: Food Studies in Latin American Literature: Perspectives on the Gastronarrative ed. by Rocío del Águila and Vanesa Miseres Elvira Sánchez-Blake Águila, Rocío del, and Vanesa Miseres, editors. Food Studies in Latin American Literature: Perspectives on the Gastronarrative. The U of Arkansas P, 2021. Pp. 248. ISBN 978-1-68226-181-1. This book offers an engaging collection of essays about food culture and literature from the pre-Columbian times to the present spanning discussions of class, race, gender, and nationalisms. This volume is part of the University of Arkansas Press Series on foodways exploration in global food studies. The compilation offers a critical lens to examine broader cultural environmental and ethical issues around food as the center of literary criticism. The authors coin the term “gastronarrative” to describe the object of study (food and literature) and to refer to the methodology, which analyzes literary text in the context of culinary expression. They also establish the correlation between what one eats and who one is as the premises of gastronarratives. Thus, the book presents key moments in Latin American traditions in which foodways are central to the shaping of the continent’s identity politics with food at the core of the literary scene. Throughout the essays contained in the book, the authors do not limit the analysis to literature, but rather as they explain, “insert literary topics, metaphors, and strategies to discussions on food within the humanities” (11). The analysis includes manuscripts, magazines articles, cookbooks, menus, etiquette manuals, visual culture, and other resources to allow for narrato-logical and historiographical inquires. This also brings about the analysis of the intersection of race, gender and class, consumption and consumerism, culinary imaginaries, and a cartography of food culture in Latin America. Food Studies in Latin American Literature opens with a compelling introduction to the field of food studies and its intersection to literature. The analysis departs from Terry Eagleton’s concept of “edible écriture” in which “connections between food and literature allow[s] us to analyze power structures, coloniality, the paradoxes of modernity, and our own complexity as humans in terms of exchange” (4). The authors propose the idea of food as a narrative in and of itself as an expression of aesthetic, political and cultural statements. [End Page 139] They subscribe to Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic structure to create their “own gastrolinguistic sign” as a space where meaning is created. The essays also explore the traditions of Latin American food as rituals and cultural marks from pre-Columbian texts to well-known literary pieces of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. An important discussion deals with how food shaped the modern concept of citizenship, as a mark of national identity, social class, and racial distinction. The chapters in the book organize thematically in four different sections. Part I focuses on indigenous heritage and colonialism. One article discusses food and power as a means of resistance in colonial Andes by examining texts by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in Peru. Another text refers to the importance of potatoes as a subject or earlier chronicles of the seventeen century and its subsequent incorporation in European diets. A third article focuses on the culinary world of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, discussing the Recetario de Sor Juana, a collection of recipes attributed to the famous nun. It showcases the complex mestizaje of food reflecting the cultural diversity of eighteenth-century Mexican society. Part II illustrates the interaction of national identities, regionalisms and transnational food-ways in nineteenth-century Latin America. One chapter explores how the flow of immigrants affected the ways in which food was incorporated in the social fabric of Mexico and Peru. The argument is that in these countries the elites sought to create societies that were modern, progressive, and up to date looking like United States and Europe. Another essay centers on travel literature of the nineteenth century in Colombia to enlighten discussions of coloniality, race, class, and food. Other essays focus on travel journals where food was a symbol of class. One chapter is devoted to Argentine author Eduarda Mansilla’s Recuerdos de viaje, 1882...