Introduction. Transhispanic Food Cultural Studies: Defining the Subfield

Abstract

This introductory article argues for making food central to a praxis of cultural studies in the transhispanic world and the importance of inserting Hispanist voices into the arena of food studies scholarship more broadly. Articles in this Special Issue illustrate that foodways of the transhispanic world are heterogeneous and conflicted. Yet, food discourses allow us to study how people think with food, using it to mark identities, to establish power relationships and to dispute them. Articles in this collection demonstrate how transnational forces condition the food cultures and discourses of this context. They also highlight culinary nationalism and the inextricable links communities and nation-states construct and sustain between food and national cuisines from within and outside of nation-states or state-less nations. Both critical frameworks, the transnational—which engages imperial expansion, neocolonialism, globalization and migration—, and the national—in which foodways change in the context of intercultural encounters, are essential to understanding food cultures and their discursive and textual forms in this context.

Key words:

• Transhispanic world
• Food cultural studies
• Food discourse
• Culinary nationalism
• Transnational foodways

Notes

1 Emilia Pardo Bazán, La cocina española antigua (Madrid: Biblioteca de la Mujer, 1913), iii.

2 See Lara Anderson, Cooking up the Nation: Spanish Culinary Texts and Culinary Nationalization in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013); and Rebecca Ingram, ‘Popular Tradition and Bourgeois Elegance in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s cocina española’, BHS, XCI:3 (2014), 261–74.

3 Massimo Montanari, Let the Meatballs Rest, and Other Stories about Food and Culture, trans. Albert Sonnenfeld (New York: Columbia U. P., 2012), 1.

4 Montanari, Let the Meatballs Rest, trans. Sonnenfeld, 2.

5 Roland Barthes, ‘Toward a Psychosociology of Food Consumption’, in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan & Penny Van Esterik, 3^rd ed. (New York/London: Routledge, 2013), 23–30 (p. 25).

6 On food and migration/transnationalism, see projects and seminars at the Culinaria Research Centre, University of Toronto and recent issues of Global Food History.

7 See Psyche Williams-Forson & Rachel Slocum, ‘Race in the Study of Food’, Progress in Human Geography, 35:3 (2010), 303–27; Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York U. P., 2018); Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge U. P., 2012); and Meredith Abarca, Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World from Working-Class Mexican and Mexican American Women (College Station: Texas A&M U. P., 2006).

8 María Paz Moreno, Madrid: A Culinary History (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); H. Rosi Song & Anna Riera, Barcelona: A Culinary and Cultural History of Catalan Cuisine (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

9 See Lara Anderson, ‘Cuisine, Communication, Corpus: Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Naturalist Vision in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Spain’, MA dissertation (University of Auckland, 1999); Rebecca Ingram, ‘Spain on the Table: Cookbooks, Women, and Modernization, 1905–1933’, Doctoral dissertation (Duke University, North Carolina, 2009). In addition to Lara Anderson’s Cooking up the Nation (see above, note 2), see her ‘Commercial Success or Culinary Legacy: Turn-of-the Century Spanish Culinary Nationalization’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos, 34:2 (2010), 341–58. By Rebecca Ingram, see ‘Popular Tradition and Bourgeois Elegance in Emilia Pardo Bazán’s cocina española’ (see above, note 2), and ‘Mapping and Mocking: Spanish Cuisine and Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s “El primer mapa gastronómico de España” ’, in Writing about Food: Culinary Literature in the Hispanic World, Cincinnati Romance Review, 33 (2012), 78–97.

10 The Columbian exchange refers to the circulation of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology and ideas between the Americas and Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It also relates to European colonization and trade following Columbus’ voyage.

11 Bob Ashley, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones & Ben Taylor, ‘Food-cultural Studies—Three Paradigms’, in their Food and Cultural Studies (London/New York: Routledge, 2004), 1–25 (p. 1)

12 See Barthes, ‘Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption’ and, by the same author, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001 [1^st French ed. 1957]); Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John & Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Raymond Williams, ‘Culture Is Ordinary’, in The Raymond Williams Reader, ed. John Higgins (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 10–24; Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed., with an intro., by Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993) and his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, intro. by Tony Bennett (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Luce Giard, Michel de Certeau & Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life. Volume 2, Living and Cooking, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1998); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986) and his Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power, and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

13 See Helen Graham & Jo Labanyi, ‘Introduction. Culture and Modernity: The Case of Spain’, in Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity, ed. Helen Graham & Jo Labanyi (Oxford/New York: Oxford U. P., 1995), 1–24 (p. 5).

14 Abril Trigo, ‘General Introduction’, in The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Ana Del Sarto, Alicia Riós & Abril Trigo (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2004), 1–14 (pp. 3–4).

15 See Julie Guthman, ‘Field Notes. Food: Provocation’, Member Voices, Fieldsites, 4 August, <https://culanth.org/fieldsights/food-provocation> (accessed 7 October 2019).

16 See Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Johnson.

17 Alberto Ribas-Casasayas & Amanda Petersen, ‘Introduction’, in Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Transhispanic Narratives, ed. Alberto Ribas-Casasayas & Amanda Petersen (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2015), 1–12 (p. 10).

18 See Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2013); Earle, The Body of the Conquistador; and Carolyn Nadeau, Food Matters: Alonso Quijano’s Diet and the Discourse of Food in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2016).

19 On the political and gendered dimensions of the term Latinx, see Salvador Vidal-Ortiz & Juliana Martínez, ‘Latinx Thoughts: Latinidad with an X’, Latino Studies, 16:3 (2018), 384–95.

20 Gwen E. Chapman & Brenda L. Beagan, ‘Food Practices and Transnational Identities’, Food, Culture & Society, 16:3 (2013), 367–86 (p. 368).

21 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, ‘Culinary Nationalism’, Gastronomica. The Journal of Critical Food Studies, 10:1 (2010), 102–09 (p. 105).

22 See Eugenia Afinoguénova, ‘ “Unity, Stability, Continuity”: Heritage and the Renovation of Franco’s Dictatorship in Spain, 1957–1969’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 16:6 (2010), 420–24; and Lara Anderson, ‘The Unity and Diversity of La olla podrida: An Autochthonous Model of Spanish Culinary Nationalism’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 14:4 (2013), 400–14.

23 Earle, The Body of the Conquistador, 2–3.

24 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2006), 4.

25 Sanjeev Khagram & Peggy Levitt, ‘Constructing Transnational Studies’, in The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations, ed. Sanjeev Khagram & Peggy Levitt (London/New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–22 (p. 4).

26 See for example Robby Soave, ‘White-Owned Restaurants Shamed for Serving Ethnic Food: It’s Cultural Appropriation: “It’s about profit, ownership, and wealth in a white supremacist culture” ’, Reason.com, 23 May 2017, n.p.; available at <https://reason.com/2017/05/23/someone-created-a-list-of-ethnic-restaur/> (accessed 4 September 2019).

27 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), 21; quoted in Nadeau, ‘Food Fit for a King’, note 5.

28 Arjun Appadurai, ‘How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30:1 (1988), 3–24 (p. 21).

29 Ferguson, Accounting for Taste, 127.

30 Krishnendu Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 1.

31 On the meanings derived from practice and cooking, see also Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1990), and Giard, Certeau & Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 2, Living and Cooking, trans. Tomasik.

32 Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur, xix.

33 Ray, The Ethnic Restaurateur, xix.

34 Juana Inés de la Cruz, ‘Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz’, Biblioteca Digital Tamaulipas, 13; available at <http://www.bdigital.unal.edu.co/39758/1/132027.pdf> (accessed 7 October 2019).

35 Juana Inés de la Cruz, ‘Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz’, 13.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.