Abstract
This paper focuses on the theoretical-methodological challenges of writing a genealogy of chile metaphors that did not solely rely on canonic literary texts. My prior study of Latin American crónica (LatinX Reading Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches From a Decolonial Rebellion) told me to expect gaps colonization created in North America’s literary archive, especially after the 17th century, when New Spain’s administrators only permitted Native uses of literacy that served their administrative interests. My solution was to create a heuristic for reading the chile performances of Native poets, chefs, and farmers against the grain of their colonizing representations in the culinary, economic, and scientific literature. And I then trusted myself to look for evidence of that heuristic in my Southern California childhood, its metaphors of taste, place, and memory performed and embodied by my family’s everyday Mexican cooking, ranching, and gardening practices. From those recollections I proceeded to build out a performative theory of metaphor that would sustain the post-mimetic logic of my forthcoming book, The Poetics of Fire: Decolonizing the Metaphors of Chile in the Borderlands now under review at UC Press.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2022 Special Focus—Imagining the Edible: Food, Creativity, and the Arts
KEYWORDS
Metaphor Poetics Decolonization
