Culinary and dietary norms can serve as instruments of colonial, neocolonial, cis-heterosexist, and racial oppression, as observed across numerous cultural contexts. Arjun Appadurai coined the term “gastro-politics” to name how social transactions regarding food can erupt into “conflict ... over specific cultural or economic resources” (“Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia,” American Ethnologist 8, no. 3, 1981: 495). Scholars such as Parama Roy explore how social and political relations in South Asia emerge through ideas about food and embodiment. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Anita Mannur, Krishnendu Ray and others examine how notions of appetite, revulsion, and proper eating undergird racial power and immigrant experiences in America. Indigenous scholars such as Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi) argue that industrial food systems are technologies of settlement, used to disrupt Native systems and physically alter landscapes.
Yet food histories and lived practices also offer radical sites of resistance and reconfiguration, allowing marginalized subjects to rethink relations within and beyond human communities. A growing body of scholarship places vegetarianism and veganism at the center of critical discourses regarding climate change and environmental ethics. Thinkers such as Margaret Robinson (Lennox Island First Nation) advocate Indigenous veganism as a decolonial diet. The establishment of Vegan Studies by scholars such as Laura Wright and Emelia Quinn shows that meat-averse lifestyles are also entering mainstream discourses and markets. Yet white, Western vegan advocacy can import racist agendas and interfere with food sovereignty efforts. Vegetarianism can likewise become hegemonic: for example, Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi argues that Hindu nationalists rationalized a 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom by mobilizing disgust toward meat-eating (Pogrom in Gujarat, Princeton UP, 2012). Conversely, urban westernization and neoliberal globalization in India have intensified disordered eating and embodied excess centered around secular iterations of vegetarianism (Harris Solomon, Metabolic Living: Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness in India, Duke UP, 2016). These frictions illustrate the need for context-specific, intersectional, comparative work on gastropolitics as it relates to justice and environmental futurity.
This session offers “reconfiguring tastes” as a lens for connective and interdisciplinary work across postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies, Iberian studies, food studies, and environmental humanities. The session features early-career scholars who are laying groundwork for such cross-field conversations. Not all panelists have published extensively, as we include two Ph.D. candidates and two junior faculty members; however, all are conducting intriguing research that merits a platform at MLA.
Denisa Krásná approaches the topic through Indigenous studies in “Animal Colonialism in North America: Towards Indigenous Decolonial Veganism.” Milk, Krásná argues, is constructed as a symbol of white purity and virility to support white supremacist and speciesist “animal agriculture.” In response, some Indigenous thinkers are proposing Indigenous veganism, which Krasna highlights as a path for environmentally-friendly decolonization.
Whereas Krásná focuses on Indigeneity, Anthony Palmiscno highlights immigrant subjectivities in “‘Esta es su casa’: Postcolonial Transgression and the Culinary Space in Flores de otro mundo.” Palmiscno situates the kitchen as a space of decolonial agency for a Dominican immigrant mother in film by Icíar Bollaín, which he reads in dialogue with Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel’s Mexican-American cookbook Decolonize Your Diet.
In “Disordered Vegetarianism: Conflicted Performances of Purity and Power through Dietary Norms in India,” Shakuntala Ray examines hegemonic vegetarianism in the context of neoliberal globalization in secular Indian settings. She looks at how contemporary novelists such as Abha Dawesar and Aravind Adiga reveal conflicted performances of purity and power through disordered and contradictory dietary practices which resist uniform understandings of vegetarianism as a decolonial alternative in the context of climate futures and urbanization.
B. Jamieson Stanley offers a comparative postcolonial framework in “Vegetarian/Vegan Ambivalence: Gastropolitics and Climate Futures in India and South Africa.” Thinking in light of events that position vegetarianism/veganism as tools of Hindu nationalism or white supremacy, Stanley considers how novelists Prayaag Akbar and Henrietta Rose-Innes negotiate ambivalences of vegetarianism/veganism in imagining climate futures.
These four papers will each be 12-13 minutes in length, allowing 5 minutes to introduce panelists and 18-22 minutes for unstructured discussion.