Twelfth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

How are we connected with food ideologically? Within the context of colonial expansion, the material and literary cultures of the early modern period were imbued with novel and shifting foodstuffs and foodways; while simultaneously intertwined inextricably with the development of political notions such as “race” and “nation.” Drawing from Ian Hodder’s theory on entanglement, which foregrounds the human-thing interrelations, I propose that there is an agency in food as such a thing. By observing this agential potency of food and human engagement with food, this project probes the significance of such entanglements in the formation and establishment of politics, particularly identities and categories pertaining to race, nation, and colonialism. The spatiotemporal setting of the English colony of Jamestown in the seventeenth century serves as a case study as it was an intersectional locus in which different food, cultures, and identities of the New and the Old Worlds coexisted. The Jamestown inhabitants initially distinguished them from the ‘savage’ natives they encountered, identifying with the English ‘back home’ in Europe through their dietary choices and habits. However, as their engagement with the food of their new home evolves, so does their identity, social order, and culture as Virginians — distinctive from the English — develop. By paying attention to food as agents in the formation and transformation of identity, this paper delineates how the meanings of race and politics of colonialism have emerged and advanced, and how they were tangibly articulated and concretized in both material presences and literary tropes of food.

Presenters

Eunwoo Yoo
Student, Ph.D. Candidate in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, United States