Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean

Sarah Lawson Welsh is Associate Professor and Reader in English and Postcolonial Literatures at York St John University, UK.

• AcknowledgmentsList of IllustrationsIntroductionChapter One - Famine, Feeding and Feasting: Slave Foods, Provision Grounds and the Planters’ TablesChapter Two - White Writings: The Nineteenth CenturyChapter Three - Black Hunger and White Plenitude: Food and Social Order in Two Historiographic Metafictions Chapter Four - Caribbean Food, Writing and IdentityChapter Five - KitchenTalk: Caribbean Women Talk about Food Chapter Six - Reading the Culinary Nation: Recipes Books and Barbados Chapter Seven - ‘Put Some Music in Your Food’: Caribbean Food and DiasporaBibliography

Welsh (York St John Univ., UK) aims to reform and expand the study of Caribbean food through orality, fictions, and nonfictions. Through seven chapters, dating from the Amerindians' foodways to food patterns in 2018, she investigates Caribbean food via oral presentations, literary texts, historical accounts, travel writings, memoirs, and cookery books. Chapters 1 and 2 delve into the foodways and social order from early white accounts of Caribbean foods. The third chapter is a continuum focusing on foods in the 19th century, while chapter 4 focuses on food and the politics of identity through race, class, caste, and gender in literary texts, and chapter 6 replicates the same emphasis using cookbooks from Barbados. Interviews with Bajan women form the core of chapter 5, and the final chapter looks at Rastafarians’ eating habits. Altogether, the text has insightful pictures, an informative foreword, and a solid introduction, including historical background, theories, methodology, and structure, making this an important addition to the study of Caribbean gastronomy. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.