Introduction: decolonizing French food

ABSTRACT

What are the conceptual, cultural, and economic stakes involved in thinking literature and foodways as intertwined? Theorizing food in this way fosters an interdisciplinary, intersectional approach that pays careful attention to the cultural and material pathways through which food is produced, consumed, symbolized, and invested with meaning. Scrutinizing the ideological and material underpinnings of culinary practices allows us to better appreciate food’s figurative richness and contribution to the making, unmaking, and remaking of French culture and socio-political relations. The introduction to this Special Issue reviews recent efforts in the field of Food Studies to advance such an analysis and situates the primary lines of inquiry taken up in this volume in relation to the critical frameworks that inform them. What the articles gathered here demonstrate is that acts of eating, as well as the depiction of food in art and history, both shape and are shaped by racialized and gendered power dynamics, affective investments and attachments, and economic inequities. Xenophilia and xenophobia, exoticism and repulsion are intimately connected; both modalities abstract and flatten the foodstuffs and creative capacities of the non-European. A key question that emerges in this issue is, then: How might we build better modes of conviviality, of eating together and living together well?

Résumé

Pourquoi penser la littérature et l’alimentation comme indissociables ? Quels sont les enjeux philosophiques, culturels ou économiques d’une telle approche ? Procéder de cette manière, c’est adopter une optique interdisciplinaire et intersectionnelle permettant d’élucider les réseaux de production et de consommation alimentaires, les voies culturelles et matérielles qui influencent notre conceptualisation de la nourriture et la façon dont nous l’investissons de sens. L’introduction à ce numéro spécial retrace de récents efforts pour avancer ce travail dans le domaine des études alimentaires afin de situer dans leur contexte critique les grandes lignes d’enquête adoptées par les intervenants. Ce que démontrent les articles rassemblés ici c’est que l’acte de manger, tout comme la représentation de la nourriture dans l’art et dans l’histoire, façonne les liens affectifs et les rapports de pouvoir fondés sur la race, le genre, et la classe sociale autant qu’il est façonné par ces forces. La xénophobie et la xénophilie, l’exotisme et la répulsion sont les deux faces d’une même pièce; toutes ces modalités réduisent le non-Européen et sa façon de s’alimenter à une caricature simpliste, niant sa capacité créatrice. Une question capitale ressort donc de ce numéro: Comment construire de meilleures formes de convivialité ? Comment, en fin de compte, bien manger, bien vivre ensemble ?

What is at stake in studying food today? Because eating is so central to biological and social life, practices surrounding the selection, rejection, cultivation, and consumption of foodstuffs have long interested scholars in numerous disciplines, from anthropology and sociology to economics, medicine, religion, and philosophy. How and what people do or should eat has been the subject of nutritional analyses, public health studies, and psychobiological examinations of appetence and inappetence; ethical debates over meat-eating and the rights of animals; political science and agrotechnical investigations into the ecology of famine, genetic engineering, mass production, patenting, and biopiracy; cultural studies analyses of food’s function in ritual and symbolic systems; race and gender studies inquiries into the production of normative subjectivities and systemic inequalities; and histories of science, labour, conflict, and revolution, to name only a few of the angles researchers have adopted. Food studies continue to appeal strongly to scholars today in part because working with such a multifaceted phenomenon allows us to partake in an interdisciplinary feast. The cultural, political, economic, technoscientific, and rhetorical dimensions of food are deeply entangled and thus call for collaborative, intersectional approaches. The promise of scholarly conviviality, the excitement of having something to bring to the collective table, is not negligible in a neoliberal era in which the value of higher education in general, and of humanistic disciplines in particular, is frequently thrown into question by policy makers and funding bodies. But more specifically, eating practices serve as an entry point into a series of questions weighing heavily on scholars across the university today because they have to do with the precarity and very sustainability of human and nonhuman life on Earth: Can we eat our way to climate justice? Whose knowledges and epistemes will underpin the definitions of ‘justice’ that prevail in struggles over climate change? Under what conditions do workers grow, pick, process, pack, ship, prepare, and deliver sustenance? In what ways does growing recognition, under the COVID-19 pandemic, that these workers are ‘essential’ create new leverage for negotiations over labour rights—or, conversely, new vulnerabilities to illness, surveillance, and legal or de facto compulsion to carry out their duties at the risk of their health? Who are the ‘we’ who ultimately go hungry or eat our fill, and what political and economic arrangements create such cleavages between us?

The articles in this Special Issue, ‘Decolonizing French Food’, demonstrate how imperative it is to think literature and foodways as intertwined if we hope to address the questions above meaningfully. As these essays show, eating practices in France, as well as the depiction of food in art and history, both shape and are shaped by racialized and gendered power dynamics, French colonial ideologies and republican universalist discourses, affective investments and attachments, and economic inequities. Reading French literature with an eye for eating—and reading eating practices with a literary critical eye— elucidates the specific ways in which food, or ‘food-language’, to use Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s terms, functions as a ‘communicative medium’ but also ‘as the constitutive outside of textuality’, as that which ‘consistently disrupts written text as a sign of embodied existence, as a mark of the outer limits of language, and as a trope for written language’s inability to fully represent the life of the body’ (2005, 244). In food we find a material-symbolic nexus, a stuff, moreover, that continually reminds us that these two vectors are inseparable but also irreducible to one another. First, food is word and word is food; as literary cannibalism movements in the French Caribbean and across the Americas made clear in the early twentieth century, verbal representations of consumption go hand in hand with colonial practices of cultural and economic appropriation.¹ As Jacques Derrida’s work on the ethics of eating well (1991) and the human relationship to non-human animals (2006, 2008-2010) has also famously shown, the literal/metaphorical distinction we might use to differentiate between these two forms of language—food as literal nourishment and words as symbolic sustenance—does not hold up to scrutiny. Eating is inevitably an act of meaning-making involving physical digestion and symbolic assimilation at the same time, while verbal communication, as Kelly Oliver puts it, similarly involves acts of digestion:

All forms of identification and assimilation in relations to the Other (language, meaning, and so forth) and others (including animals, plants, rocks, and so forth) are literal and/or metaphorical forms of eating. … One learns language through assimilating words, one understands others and communicates with them by assimilating traditions and values, and so forth. Both words and food move through the orifices of the body, most particularly the mouth. (2014, 460)

And yet food’s materiality remains distinct from that of words; each form moves through the body and the world in sometimes overlapping but sometimes diverging ways. One of the major goals of Food Studies today, then, is to understand better the specificity of these movements and how we might intervene in them to reshape food-language’s meanings and impacts. What are the precise cultural and material relationships and pathways through which food is produced, consumed, symbolized, and invested with significance?

In pursuit of answers to this question, recent studies of global foodways—a term that draws attention to the connections between cultural beliefs and practices surrounding eating, and the material and libidinal economies through which food is produced and consumed—have frequently focused on scale, first as a way to take stock of previous theorizations of eating and to map the relationships between different lines of inquiry into the subject, and, second, as a means for building new inter- or trans-disciplinary approaches to food that take account of neglected forms of experience, expression, labour, and cultural transmission. For example, Emma-Jayne Abbots, Anna Lavis, and Luci Attala’s co-edited volume Careful Eating: Bodies, Food, and Care (2016) studies the multidirectional and ‘often-jagged’ interactions between food and care on varying levels, ‘from state-led interventions and public health discourses to the workplace, from the market to the home, and in the intimacies of individual eating and feeding practices’, in order to draw out the more troubling ‘governing processes of normativity, regulation and control’ in which the ‘seeming benevolence of care is deeply embedded’ (2016, 1, 7). Similarly, Rachel Slocum and Arun Saldanha’s Geographies of Race and Food: Fields, Bodies, Markets draws on assemblage theory to investigate racism’s underacknowledged role in the global food system and the operations of a racialized biopolitics that acts on embodied dispositions and desires, as well as social arrangements, ‘seeping into not simply institutions and discourses but into the division of labor, the stock exchange, supermarkets, advertising, habits, and affects such as hunger and disgust’ (2013, 2). Attending to the dynamic relationships between orders of different magnitude in this way—from cellular processes, microbiomes, and organ interactions to the individual body, the body politic, and the biosphere—allows researchers to rethink working assumptions about agency (human and nonhuman) and about connections or disconnections between different scales of life.

As Donna Haraway has shown, paying close attention to scale also requires us to move continually between detail and abstraction, between particular example and generalizing theorization in ways that attune us to the very terms of the questions we ask and to the ‘real places’, or historically specific situations, ‘where judgment and action are at stake’ (2008, 88). Training ourselves to look for points of contact and imbrication between beings and scales—to the ‘entangled assemblages of relatings knotted at many scales and times with other assemblages, organic and not’ that ‘individual animals, human and nonhuman’ are—matters for the conclusions we draw about ontology but also for our ethics and our politics (2008, 88). For Haraway, this attentiveness to assemblages and the scales of their dynamisms drags us back to messy earth, away from the lure of transcendence and the illusory comforts of rule-bound, calculable procedures for solving matters of life and death. ‘Ways of living and dying matter’, she affirms, elaborating,

Which historically situated practices of multispecies living and dying should flourish? There is no outside from which to answer that mandatory question; we must give the best answers we come to know how to articulate, and take action, without the god trick of self-certainty. (2008, 88)

The messiness of these questions, far from letting us off the hook, requires us to wade into the details and to remain open to revising our positions.

Like any other analytical category, scale must continually be re-interrogated, for it is not immune to ethnocentrism and epistemically violent deployment. We cannot assume that scales that prove meaningful in one context will translate directly to another; rather, we must practice inquiring into vantage point, dynamics, and points of contact within and between different spheres of life. One place to begin of course is those locations and perspectives that are marginalized in a given socio-economic order and from there ‘read up the ladder of privilege’, to use Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s expression (2003, 231). ‘Within a tightly integrated capitalist system’, Mohanty writes, ‘the particular standpoint of poor indigenous and Third World/South women’ is the analytical starting point that ‘provides the most inclusive viewing of systemic power’, the vantage point from which the entanglements between capitalism, environmental racism, and intellectual piracy of indigenous knowledges, for example, can best be apprehended (2003, 232). For Lydie Moudileno and Étienne Achille, authors of Mythologies postcoloniales: Pour une décolonisation du quotidien, everyday life is another such location or sphere requiring renewed scrutiny. If, as they argue, scholars now acknowledge the day-to-day as ‘porteur de sens et donc digne d’intérêt pour l’étude des identités individuelles et collectives et de leurs représentations’ (thanks to the work of thinkers like Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau and Georges Perec), ‘le quotidien’ is the level at which much racism manifests itself in France today and which remains to be decolonized (2018, 7). ‘Il n’y a dans le racisme ordinaire’, they observe, ‘rien d’anodin au sens étymologique du terme: ce qui ne provoque pas de douleur … Au contraire, pour de nombreuses personnes issues des minorités, le quotidien est un lieu de grande vulnérabilité’ (2018, 12).

By centring foodstuffs and foodways in their analyses, the essays in this Special Issue on Decolonizing French Food similarly elucidate the everyday, and thereby the tangled relationship between France’s long investment in colour-blind universalism—the cherished paradigm underpinning republican ideals of freedom and equality—and its own intricate heterogeneity, a heterogeneity that bears the traces of France’s imperial past. Everyday life, as Moudileno and Achille argue, is the site where individuals experience the gap between aspirational ideal and current reality concretely as a series of contradictions: ‘la liberté et la surveillance, l’hospitalité et le rejet, l’ordre et le désordre, l’oubli et la mémoire, le visible et l’invisible, le même et le divers, et bien d’autres encore’ (2018, 8). Moreover, differently situated individuals live these tensions in divergent, racialized ways. And yet the disavowal of this persistent racialization represents an obstacle to addressing the major social and political question facing France now, ‘la question du “vivre-ensemble” français’ (2018, 8). What forms can or should communal life take? How might the ideals of the Republic be truly realized? As Moudileno and Achille note, ‘“L’impensé de la race”, selon l’expression d’Achille Mbembe, est à la fois pilier du modèle républicain et le point sur lequel achoppe une véritable hospitalité de la République’ (2018, 9). Only by carefully analysing this stumbling block, by thinking what has gone unthought and examining in detail the workings of racialized ideologies in a nominally ‘post-colonial’ era, can new modes of conviviality—in the strong sense of meaningful coexistence or ‘vivre-ensemble’—emerge.

Derrida famously brought out the layered meanings of conviviality in his meditations on what it means to eat and to live together well—bien manger (1991, 115) and bien vivre ensemble (2013, 23). The rhetorical parallel he draws in formulating the two imperatives il faut bien manger and il faut bien vivre ensemble evokes the double binds to which we are called to respond as living beings who must eat to stay alive but also thereby consume other living organisms.² Given that we do and must live and eat among others, states Derrida, ‘the moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there’s no other definition of the good (du bien), how for goodness sake should one eat well (bien manger)?’ (1991, 115). An ethical practice of eating well endeavours to overcome the binary oppositions of digestion and exclusion, or absorption and expulsion that structure dominant modes of conviviality.³

As the contributors to this Special Issue show, such oppositions are deeply entrenched, as is perhaps best seen when they re-emerge in unexpected places. UNESCO’s promotion of the repas gastronomique des Français, which the organization added to its Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010, serves as a case in point for a number of the articles in this volume. Even as UNESCO celebrated the hospitality of France, as manifested by the diversity its cuisine accommodates, this recognition relies on a notion of French culture, or the French people, les Français, as bounded and definable. Conceptualizing culture in this way works to homogenize the ‘French’ meal, subsuming diversity under a recognizable identity (Philippe C. Dubois, this issue, pp. 301-317), as well as to perpetuate native/foreign distinctions underpinning claims to authenticity in anxious public debates over which foods, behaviours, and people count as properly ‘French’ and which should be excluded from national belonging (Grove, this issue, 271–273). Moreover, as Elizabeth M. Collins’s work demonstrates, the hospitality touted in UNESCO’s promotional materials for the repas gastronomique is conceptualized not as an unconditional openness to otherness and the possibility of change, but rather as a hierarchical relationship in which France, the more powerful host, ‘welcomes’ diversity into her fold, but only on the condition that this diversity can be digested and assimilated without fundamentally altering ‘French’ identity or the power imbalance between the nation and the guest. As Collins observes of UNESCO’s visual grammar,

while the repas welcomes foreign ‘ingredients’ to the table, the same invitation is not explicitly extended to foreign people … racialised persons are not to be eaten with at the table, but may find a place either on it, as a consumable product, or behind it, as someone who serves, or both. (this issue, 245)

The Frenchness of gastronomic culture has also been advanced as a rationale for factory meat production, raising questions about humans’ ethical responsibilities to nonhuman animals, as well as the environmental damage done in the name of cultural identity. In response to Élisabeth Roudinesco’s claim that industrialized animal farming is necessary to prevent starvation and also integral to French culture—so much so that she wonders whether ‘la tradition française’ could in fact ‘se passer de viande’—Derrida counters,

La consommation de la viande n’a jamais été une nécessité biologique. On ne mange pas de la viande simplement parce qu’on a besoin de protéines—et les protéines peuvent être trouvées ailleurs … . Il y a d’autres ressources pour le raffinement gastronomique. La viande industrielle n’est le fin du fin en gastronomie. (Derrida and Roudinesco 2001, 119-20)

The anthropocentrism underpinning the promotion of meat-eating is bound up with the logocentrism and phallocentrism Derrida detects at the heart of Western metaphysics, an imbrication he represents with the coinage carno-phallogocentrism (1991, 113). In stressing this point, his work dovetails with Carol J. Adams’s pivotal (1990) study, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, which drew out Western models of masculinity associating virility with meat-eating and women with objectified, consumable animals.⁴ Far from being a cultural ornament or an epiphenomenal expression, gastronomy plays a material role in reproducing anthropocentric and patriarchal power structures—and thus also becomes a key site of struggle for those who seek change.

How exactly we might develop effective modes of resistance and new forms of conviviality is thus a central concern of the articles gathered together here in this volume. Working to uncover the disavowed logics of racism and xenophobia and the mechanisms through which they function in French society—which include not only overtly hostile reactions to alterity but also superficially ‘positive’ expressions of xenophilic exoticism—represents one vital plank in this project, as does thinking intersectionally about the gender and class distinctions that shape practices of eating, assimilation, and exclusion in conjunction with these other forces. This Special Issue scrutinizes the ideological and material underpinnings of culinary representations across a range of genres and formats, allowing us to better appreciate the tropological richness of food and its contribution to the making, unmaking, and remaking of French culture and socio-political relations.

Decolonizing French Food begins with a piece that looks back to the Third Republic to examine the role of cooking and eating in the construction of French subjectivities and in efforts to contest cultural norms and hegemonic models of civic behaviour. Elizabeth M. Collins zooms in on one particular foodstuff—rice—and one specific piece of colonial ephemera in order to tease out the complex interactions between visual representation, verbal conceptualization, embodied experience, and commodification in imagined projections of an ideal French body politic. Analysing the relationships linking such disparate phenomena as children’s games, advertisements, and domestic labour markets, ‘“Le Riz d’Indochine” at the French Table: Representations of Food, Race, and the Vietnamese in a Colonial-Era Board Game’ closely examines the forms that anti-Asian racism takes in France, illuminating a troubling ongoing problem yet one that often goes unrecognized because its violence frequently operates through positive stereotype. Xenophilia and xenophobia—the logics of exoticism and repulsion governing which foods are desired or envied, and which are devalued as signs of the other’s cultural inferiority—are two sides of the same coin. Both modalities abstract and flatten the foodstuffs and creative capacities of the colonized. As Collins astutely shows, the conflation of rice with Vietnamese bodies in the 1931 jeu de l’oie is representative of a broader tendency to treat Asians as agreeable, pliant, consumable subjects—welcome (and needed) in the French nation as service workers, but not as equals who could aspire to anything more than supportive roles. Such a discourse attempts to manage the dissonance of France’s contradictions—as a republic committed to universalism and an empire requiring the subjugation of some to the will of others—by portraying national unity and racial hierarchies as compatible.

Sylvia Grove pursues these stumbling blocks for universalism in ‘Cooking for Everyone through Bande Dessinée: Gender, Race, and the Limits of Culinary Democracy in Guillaume Long’s À boire et à manger’. Long’s culinary comic (published in four parts from 2012 to 2017) aims explicitly to democratize cooking—to make the art of gastronomy more accessible to all—by translating it into a popular aesthetic form. The text does succeed in unsettling both gender norms and class distinctions that act as barriers to partaking in haute cuisine, and Grove carefully traces how Long deploys the resources of the comics genre (including playful self-portraiture, self-reflexive, humorous combinations of ‘high’ and ‘low’ literary references, and inventive, engaging graphics breaking down cooking techniques) to rework widespread conceptions of masculinity and elite taste. At the same time, Grove argues, À boire et à manger shores up racialized boundaries between ‘French’ and ‘foreigner’, reinscribing whiteness as a criterion for national belonging. Moreover, this stabilization of race helps authorize and also weaken the text’s transgressions of gender norms, rendering them both more palatable and less disruptive to the status quo.

The two final articles in this Special Issue further explore the role of narrative form in inventing new modes of conviviality. In ‘“Mon Callalou”: Maryse Condé Writing Herself as Female Cook’, Maryann Tebben examines Maryse Condé’s reclamation of cooking, and food writing, as practices of creative self-fashioning. Tracing Condé’s changing meditations on her own passions for cooking and writing from her early work to two of her more recent texts, Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (a semi-fictional biography of the author’s grandmother, a cook) and Mets et merveilles (a life and travel memoir told as a journey of meals), Tebben notes a shift in Condé’s self-portraiture from anti-conformist nomadism to a more rooted hybridity. If Condé’s earlier portrayals of cooking and literature stressed their association with wandering, eclecticism, and Condé’s independence from the myriad literary and culinary influences in opposition to which she constructs her persona, in her latest work, Condé focuses instead on incorporating these influences and inhabiting the still hybrid yet more fixed space she has carved out for herself and for Caribbean food writing.

Finally, in ‘Réinscrire la convivialité: connectivités queer du culinaire chez Abdellah Taïa’, Philippe C. Dubois argues that meals function as narratives shaping and reshaping practices of eroticism and solidarity, and thus fiction and film have a crucial role to play in confronting entrenched social hierarchies and queering the table. While Abdellah Taïa is well known for his gay rights activism and his public coming out in Morocco, Dubois looks here at his sustained, creative engagement with food as a subversive tool across his novels and films. More specifically, as Dubois’s attentive readings show, Taïa’s representations of meals, migrations, and erotic experimentations dwell on the interstices between cultures, languages, locations, and different facets of one’s own identity, using these conjunctions as levers for reterritorializing bodies, desires, and spaces and bringing new, queer convivalities into being.

The urgency of this task became even more painfully clear as the novel coronavirus pandemic unfolded unevenly across the globe. This worldwide health crisis has widened and brought into focus the inequalities that persist within France and without. The time for reimagining how to live well together has always been now, and yet this era of precariousness and risk also presents an opening for change. Will we seize it?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For recent studies of colonial appetites and resistance to them in the French context in particular, see Loichot (2013) and Githire (2014).

2. Derrida reportedly claimed at a 1993 conference at Cerisy-la-Salle that he was ‘a vegetarian in [his] soul’ (quoted in Wood 2002, 140). At the same time, he cautioned against an ‘absolute vegetarianism’, arguing that ‘vegetarians, too, partake of animals, even of men. They practice a different form of denegation’ (1991, 112, 114-15). The distinction between sentient and non-sentient beings that vegetarian arguments often depend on is not a line so easily drawn; in addition, attending to one particular form of violence (the consumption of sentient animals) does not exhaust one’s ethical responsibility to others. One still engages in other forms of assimilation (cultural, environmental, linguistic, economic, etc.) whose necessities and impacts must be evaluated.

3. Eating well as an imperative is sceptical of any notion of purity or pure difference, untouched or uncontaminated. Kim Q. Hall takes up this line of argumentation from a queer, crip vantage point, arguing for a radical alternative to the rhetoric of purity: ‘[A] metaphysics of compost understands bodies and food as interactively emergent, provisional, and contested sites where boundaries are questioned, negotiated, and open to transformation, not fixed. There are no pure bodies, no bodies with impermeable borders. Because reality is not composed of fixed, mutually exclusive, or pure bodies, a metaphysics of compost is more conducive to food politics that remains accountable to real bodies and real foods/relationships” (2014, 179). Hall singles out Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual as a problematic counter-model to the industrial food system. Pollan’s manual proceeds by ‘offering advice about how to save the planet and ourselves through better food choices.’ Take, for example, the rule ‘Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not.’ Hall points out the disturbing implications of this dictate for queer folks, since it is ‘based on an assumption that appearing to be something that one is not is always suspect and potentially dangerous, an assumption about food echoed in statements that purport to “justify” violent attacks against transgender people’ (2014, 180). See also Alexis Shotwell, who similarly argues for the need to move away from an investment in the pure and fantasies of integrity insofar as ‘a great deal of harm is done based on a metaphysics of purity; since it is false and because it is harmful, we do better to pursue metaphysics that do not aim to preserve fictions of integrity’ (2016, 16).

4. For a longer discussion of the convergences and divergences between Derrida’s and Adams’s work, see Adams and Calarco (2016).