Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence

By Keja L. Valens

SERIES: Critical Caribbean Studies

Rutgers University Press

Women across the Caribbean have been writing, reading, and exchanging cookbooks since at least the turn of the nineteenth century. These cookbooks are about much more than cooking. Through cookbooks, Caribbean women, and a few men, have shaped, embedded, and contested colonial and domestic orders, delineated the contours of independent national cultures, and transformed tastes for independence into flavors of domestic autonomy. Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence integrates new documents into the Caribbean archive and presents them in a rare pan-Caribbean perspective. The first book-length consideration of Caribbean cookbooks, Culinary Colonialism joins a growing body of work in Caribbean studies and food studies that considers the intersections of food writing, race, class, gender, and nationality. A selection of recipes, culled from the archive that Culinary Colonialism assembles, allows readers to savor the confluence of culinary traditions and local specifications that connect and distinguish national cuisines in the Caribbean.

Drawing on a fascinating range of Caribbean texts and case studies, Culinary Colonialism shows how cookbooks have historically been at the heart of projects such as women’s organization, nation building and decolonization in the region. Valens' global focus and her interdisciplinary approach in this book provide new and exciting insights into how more recent Caribbean cookbooks continue to 'migrate and circulate' through the Caribbean diaspora and to intersect with twenty-first century issues such as geopolitics, climate disaster, and new media. Combining recipes and scholarly analysis, this is a book for all those interested in the Caribbean, in Food Studies and in the burgeoning study of the intersections between the two.'
Sarah Lawson Welsh, author of Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean

A fascinating exploration of Caribbean creolization, anti-colonialism, and nationhood through the stories and concoctions of women who write and cook: 'kitchen poets,' Barbadian American novelist Paule Marshall would have called them.' Valérie Loichot, author of The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature

KEJA VALENS is a professor of English at Salem State University. She has published numerous works on Caribbean literature, women’s history, sexuality and diasporic identity, including the books Desire between Women in Caribbean Literature and Querying Consent: Beyond Permission and Refusal.

Preface: Whose Caribbean Cookbooks?
Introduction: Reading Caribbean Cookbooks
1          Nineteenth-Century Cocineros of Cuba and Puerto Rico
2          Domestic Control in West Indian Women’s Cookbooks at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
3          Colonial and Neocolonial Fortification in the French Antilles, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands
4          Cuban Independence, to Taste
5          Dominican and Haitian (Re)Emergence
6          National Culture Cook-Up and Food Independence in Jamaica and Barbados
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

Related Titles