Tasting Difference

Tasting Difference examines early modern discourses of racial, cultural, and religious difference that emerged in wake of contact with foreign peoples and exotic foods from across the globe. Gitanjali Shahani reimagines the contact zone between Western Europe and the Global South in culinary terms, emphasizing the gut rather than the gaze in colonial encounters. From household manuals that showed English women how to use the new commodities in their kitchens and the "spiced Indian air" that exoticizes A Midsummer Night's Dream to the repurposing of Othello as an early modern pitchman for coffee and travel narratives that highlighted the bizarre and the disgusting at the expense of understanding, Shahani shows how early modern literary obsessions about the allure and danger of foreign tastes and customs configured racial difference before colonial expansion. Turning maxims such as, "we are what we eat" on their head, Shahani asks how did we (the colonized subjects), become what you (the colonizing subjects) eat? How did we become alternately the object of fear and appetite, loathing and craving? Seeking answers to these questions, Shahani takes us back several centuries, to the process by which food came to be inscribed with racial character and the racial other came to be marked as edible, and shows us that the racializing of food began in an era well before chicken tikka masala and balti cuisine, and shows us how early modern literary obsessions about the allure and danger of foreign tastes and customs configured racial difference before colonial expansion.