Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies)

290 Pages·2010·0.879 MB·English

by  Parama Roy

Alimentary Tracts
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Alimentary Tracts
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9
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in memory of
Ramola Roy
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Amalendu Roy

Contents .........................
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Disgust: Food, Filth, and Anglo-Indian Flesh in 1857 31
2. Abstinence: Manifestos on Meat and Masculinity 75
3. Dearth: Figures of Famine 116
4. Appetite: Spices Redux 154
Remains: A Coda 191
Notes 195
Select Bibliography 241
Index 269

Acknowledgments .........................
This book has been a long time in the making, and whatever thanks I can
render at this point to the colleagues, friends, and institutions who have
aided me over the course of its prolonged gestation are necessarily inade-
quate. As always, my most acute interlocutors have been Carole-Anne
Tyler and Sandhya Shetty; I am grateful to them for their gifts of rigor and
imagination. I am grateful as well to Sangeeta Ray and Ajay Skaria, who
read the manuscript in its entirety with a remarkable mixture of incisive-
ness and generosity. Anjali Arondekar and a second, anonymous reader
for Duke University Press gave it the kind of meticulous scrutiny that
proved immensely useful in defining the stakes of the project. I have also
benefited immeasurably from the critical stimulus provided by a host of
other scholars: Lalitha Gopalan, Bishnu Ghosh, Sudipta Sen, Lawrence
Cohen, Catherine Robson, Sukanya Banerjee, Caren Kaplan, Piya Chatter-
jee, Inderpal Grewal, Raka Ray, Amitav Ghosh, Barbara Metcalf, Vasudha
Dalmia, Bhaskar Sarkar, Jenny Sharpe, Frances Hasso, the late Meenakshi
Mukherjee, Maria Couto, Margie Ferguson, Fran Dolan, Liz Constable,
Geeta Patel, Jennifer Brody, Suad Joseph, Omnia El-Shakry, Karl Britto,
Minoo Moallem, and Marisol Cortez. For their unsurpassed collegiality I
am deeply appreciative of Kim Devlin, Deborah Willis, George Haggerty,
Steve Axelrod, Carole Fabricant, Georg Gugelberger, Katherine Kinney,
and Joe Childers, my erstwhile colleagues at the University of California,
Riverside.
Versions of several chapters of this book were presented at uc Berke-
ley, ucla, uc Irvine, uc Santa Barbara, uc Santa Cruz, uc Riverside, uc
Davis, the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin, Mil-