Coming up next in #ShakeRace #RaceB4Race, this conversation between Jennifer Park & Gitanjali Shahani on the #FolgerCRC series. May not be able to livetweet here, but I know I have a question ready. :) :) https://twitter.com/FolgerResearch/status/1316814850429861888

Ok, can’t help but comment on Park & Shahani’s title: “We Are What You Eat.” So impt. to recenter food history scholars & practitioners of color, who have been doing the work in the larger (historical) field for a long time. That’s 1 reason I’m excited for this talk. #FolgerCRC

Shahani & Park have been long-time collaborators on food & race & EM studies for years, before it was centrally recognized. Park begins w/ highlighting the “we” of the title of the convo. #FolgerCRC

Shahani: the food cliche is so “ripe for exploration” b/c it tells us how our language relies on food for expressions, raises the digestive metaphor field of mental processes like comprehension or absorption into “knowledge” [I’m synthesizing here]. #FolgerCRC

Shahani: I wanted to think thru the inversion of the cliche; I wanted to complicate the inversion of the cliche to tell a long, violent story of food & ppl coming together historically. Park: in rewriting the food cliche, we can look also at political/legal language... #FolgerCRC

Park:...”incorporation,” “digestion,” ...these discourses can also be interrogated in this manner. Shahani: cites “going out for an Indian” in the UK - the manner in which ppl engage us (indivs) through requests for best Indian or Korean BBQ restaurants. #FolgerCRC

[ Ed. Note: loving the ease with which Hall’s “sugar at the bottom of the cup of tea” is also raised in Shahani & Park’s refs to when they are aware that they are as scholars and people being consumed by others....] #FolgerCRC

Park: cites Hendricks’ 2019 Folger talk abt Premodern CRITICAL Race Studies for impt. of the genealogies of scholarship, cites Thompkins “Racial Indigestion” & Hall’s work on sugar as essential to this work on race & food. And Ahkimie’s work on “cultivation” of bodies & lands.

Shahani: again, Hall’s work is central to our field. Also Anita Amur (sp?) - re: how race is produced through food. Also Loomba & Singh’s work aiding in conceptualizing the “culinary contact zone.” And alimentary nature of food also in Roy & others’ PoCo studies. #FolgerCRC

Shahani: Roy’s work - what if we think of the psychopharmocopia of colonialism (Marxist application in analyzing capitalism, consuming, and colonialism). [Ed. Note to Self: I gotta look at this book. ] #FolgerCRC

Shahani on the Dufour engraving (her book cover image) marks the display of 3 “Others” to Europe consuming their “native” foodstuff that becomes commodity to Europe, while themselves being consumed visually (reinforcing the food-raced-body consumption). #FolgerCRC

Park on images of dripping [honeyed?] Asian bodies (contemp. art). Reminds Shax refs Cleopatra as “salted” (preservative - [also mummies?]. Refs Hall’s work on sugar as an EM housewife’s preservative. What of the body “candied over”? #FolgerCRC

Park & Shahani underscore the drive for these commodities as engines of continuing colonization (& its many violent practices. #FolgerCRC

Shahani: the idea that spices were preservatives has been debunked. Instead, EM recipes show women’s use of the spices (here pepper) to hinder conception, bring on menstruation, in putting them in intimate contact w/ genitals. #FolgerCRC

Shahani: These practices & cooking “monstrous mingling” w/ foreign spices garner public printed critique. Raises Shax’s Midsummer & the “spiced Indian air” as the place in which the conflicts emerge from. #FolgerCRC

Park raises another metaphor of these meetings/minglings - “fluidity” and the fluid body in rel. to food an race. The body’s fluids (blood, breast milk) were infant nourishment & racial charged (see wetnursing worries). Cites Julietta Singh’s work. #FolgerCRC

Shahani: with fluids, which also include urine (pushing that line btwn what we think is food vs excrement), we are moving into the realm of racialized stimulants - AND COFFEE!!!!!!! :) #FolgerCRC

Shahani: 17th cent. ballad that floats the Othello=coffee/tea & Desdemona=pure water, with “contamination” of the pure water with racialized coffee/tea as a LONG enduring association. #FolgerCRC

Park: mummies as medicine, ostensibly taking the dead bodies from Egypt to be ground & reduced into an ingredient for Euro consumption. #FolgerCRC

[Ed. Note: Albanese was working on some of this a few years ago as well. I would also be curious abt how this consumption lays on top of saints reliques market (bones, blood)...I mean, fake reliques, fake mummy dust...? ] #FolgerCRC

Shahani asks: how do we continue to consume the Other today [in scholarship too?]. Park raises Critical Indigenous Studies and EM food studies, cites Liz Hoover & S. Sherman (sp?) and their scholarly & activist work. #FolgerCRC

Questions [Ed. Note: sorry! Missed 1st question about teaching CRS & food studies in classroom. ] Q2: body fluid recipes, can use own fluids? Shahani: the recipes are *very* specific. For ex, cure for blindness req urine of a boy. Cross gender urine req for cures. #FolgerCRC

Shahani: another recipe might req skull of a criminal or “Irishman” to be ground up for medicinal use. [!!] Park: recipe for mummy “died of violent death” or “young healthy man” - body’s specific qualities are being harnessed for medicinal uses, not so much own fluids. #FolgerCRC

Q3: how would you design an “omnivorous” course on race/food studies? Shahani: organizing around troubling the cliche (where, what, who we eat) to bring in work from http://Asian.Am  studies, enviro humanities, PoCo, etc. to drawn on many disciplines. #FolgerCRC

Park: I look as well to history of science, medicine, environmental studies, esp. philosophies of nature (early biology/nature science). All of these disciplines help to bring up new questions, make new connections for students w/ (primary) texts. #FolgerCRC

Q4: continuity of these studies w/ other commodities, like textiles? Shahani: yes, this is connected. But also important to look specifically at food and “the gut response” as playing a specific role in discourse, art, imaginary, & economics (colonization). #FolgerCRC

Park: food as a rich site to “constellate out of”, esp. body & theories of metabolism. To what extent does food trouble attempts to control the integrity of the self/body? These are important issues. #FolgerCRC

Q5: What do speakers think of hunger? Shahani: think of Jamestown & other texts of starving. What strikes is the TASTE of hunger, of food missed, & possible tastes of what COULD serve as food under deprivation. This leads of course to eating one’s spouse “powdered.” #FolgerCRC

[ Ed. Note: ketosis has a taste. Ppl chase that taste these days, or then cover it w/ mouthwash, mint, etc....] #FolgerCRC

Park: interested in the political aspect (as seen in Critical Indigenous studies work in food studies) to hunger. #FolgerCRC

Q6 on encounter & cannibalism. Park: if mummies are pagans, are they ok to eat, nature not human? “New World” cannibalism [ Ed. Note: the projection of settlers on Natives is well-documented, not just in 1492-1700, but beyond. Being clear abt the WHY of the projection is impt.]

Q7 on “unhealthy foods”. Park: the danger of foreign substances & racialization of that is then also in tension w/ the necessary foreign foods as medicine. Looking at this tension from instance to instance is key to the work. #FolgerCRC

Thank you, Jennifer & Gitanjali & the Folger Shakespeare Library for this great conversations!!! #FolgerCRC See their website for future conversations.