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Criticism Volume 63 Issue 1 The Future(s) of Early Modern Women Article 17 Writers (Double Issue) 2021 Sugar, Spice, and Cannibalism Amy L. Tigner University of Texas, Arlington, atigner@uta.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism Recommended Citation Tigner, Amy L. (2021) "Sugar, Spice, and Cannibalism," Criticism: Vol. 63 : Iss. 1 , Article 17. Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol63/iss1/17
SUGAR, SPICE, AND Bringing a fresh perspective to the
fields of early modern literature
CANNIBALISM and of food studies, Gitanjali G.
Amy L. Tigner Shahani’s Tasting Difference: Food,
Race, and Cultural Encounters in
A review of Tasting Difference: Early Modern Literature serves
Food, Race, and Cultural up a complex narrative about the
Encounters in Early Modern consumption of cultural and racial
Literature by Gitanjali G. otherness through the acquisition
Shahani. Ithaca, NY: Cornell of global foods. Perhaps one of the
University Press, 2020. Pp. 222. most revelatory points that Shahani
$39.95 cloth. emphasizes is that the vast major-
ity of early modern English (and
European) overseas voyages and
imperial ventures were undertaken
in the distinct pursuit of foreign
foodstuffs, especially spices, sugar,
chocolate, and coffee. Looking at
travel narratives, literary repre-
sentations, household manuals,
ballads, and broadsides, Shahani
shows how the acquisition and eat-
ing of foreign foods constitutes the
consumption of the racialized other,
both metaphorically and in some
cases literally. Beginning from the
early modern period, Shahani lays
bare how these patterns, desires,
and landscapes of culinary contact
zones continue to the present. In
essence, how and what we eat has a
long and often unconscious history
that stems from an ugly colonial
past and fear of the other that too
frequently persist into the present.
While previous colonial and
postcolonial scholarship has focused
on what the eye sees, that is, the
gaze, Shahani’s book innovatively
turns to the mouth, that is, what we
taste. After all, we all experience
Criticism Winter-Spring 2021, Vol. 63, Nos. 1-2, pp. 181–184. ISSN 0011-1589. 181
doi: 10.13110/criticism.63.1-2.0181
© 2021 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309
Criticism 63.1-2_17_Tigner.indd Page 181 08/06/21 7:48 pm182 Amy L. Tigner
the world most directly through the about spices came to emblematize
mouth, and Shahani contends that racialized foreign bodies. Shahani
the alimentary contact with worlds explicates how women in the
previously unknown was highly domestic space of the kitchen are
visceral and therefore what drove the drivers of the culinary trade,
desire for long distance travel, naturalizing foreign spices into
trade, and eventual plantation. English dishes.
Throughout the book, Shahani Turning to sugar, Shahani
reveals the myriad ways in which begins this chapter with an adroit
English and European contact, reading of Kara Walker’s sculp-
both at home and abroad, was a tural installation, “A Subtlety
sensory experience and constituted or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,”
the incorporation of otherness. The whose centerpiece is a sphynx-
book proceeds first through spe- like depiction of a naked African
cific commodities: spices, sugar, woman made entirely of sugar
and coffee make up the subjects of and displayed in Brooklyn’s aban-
the first three chapters. Then the doned Domino Sugar factory in
book moves to the more concep- 2014. Shahani’s critique of this
tual, upping the stakes to talk about artwork and the viewers alike
what Shahani calls “bizarre foods,” reminds us that that long history
and finally ending with a chapter of enslavement for sweetness con-
on cannibalism. tinues to reverberate in contem-
Undoubtedly, the oldest Euro- porary race relations. Shahani
pean trade in foreign foodstuffs is exposes how sugar and sweetness
spices from the East, what Shahani came to pervade both England’s
calls (using Salman Rushdie’s term), linguistic and culinary landscapes
“the hot stuff”: peppercorns, along as the seventeenth century pro-
with nutmeg, mace, and cloves. gressed. Such sweetness was liter-
The narrative of the spice trade is ally soaked in blood; examining
likely one with which most readers both fictionalized and historical
are somewhat familiar, but Shahani accounts of Caribbean sugar plan-
turns our attention to the English tations, Shahani shows how these
response, that of fear and desire, narratives equate the eating of
to the infiltration of these exotic sugar with the cannibalistic act of
commodities into native foods and consuming of the bodies of slaves.
medicines. Considering dramatic In her chapter on coffee, Shahani
texts by Middleton and Shakespeare begins by listing the multiple con-
alongside household manuals such temporary foodstuffs that are named
as culinary and medicinal recipe “Othello”: Othello teas, Othello cof-
books, Shahani deftly unveils how fees, Othello cakes, Othello choco-
English appetites for and anxieties lates. Then she elucidates why we
Criticism 63.1-2_17_Tigner.indd Page 182 08/06/21 7:48 pmSUGAR, SPICE, AND CANNIBALISM 183
still find Othello such a tasty treat. The book up to this point exam-
She writes, “To consume Othello tea ines the various ways in which early
or coffee or chocolate is to consume moderns (and perhaps we, their
the entire discourse of his exotic role modern counterparts) consume the
in the play—his thrilling traveler’s racialized other through the eating
tales, his dangerous yet alluring of exotic foodstuffs. Though this
blackness, his tragic grandeur— consumption of otherness is meta-
all in one delectable serving” (81). phorical, Shahani shows that the
Moving to Shakespeare’s play and human cost (such as the consumed
the history of coffee’s introduction bodies of slaves in the sugar plan-
into England, she thus embarks on a tations) is nonetheless unmistak-
fascinating discussion that pairs the able and considerable. Shahani’s
Othello plot and the coffee plot, both final chapter, however, shifts spec-
of which invoked both a gustatory tacularly to the literal consumption
attraction to exoticism and a sensory of others: cannibalism. Shahani
repulsion from racial and religious unspools how historical tales of “the
contamination. Starving Time” at Jamestown and
Marking a turn from foreign fictional imaginings of shipwreck
commodities in the English home and starvation in early modern
to taste experiences in the unknown plays depict the desperate, though
world, Shahani discusses the phe- also incredulous, move of eating
nomenon of “bizarre foods” in the of human flesh. These narratives
fourth chapter. Here, she analyzes in turn signify the cannibalism of
the negative taste experiences, a English colonialism more broadly.
kind of cultural indigestion, that My only slight criticism of this gen-
the early modern English record in erally excellent book is a wish for a
their travel narratives. Her inter- closer consideration in this chapter
est, she tells us, is “the dialectic of of the gender issues involved in the
disgust and desire as it unfolds in acts of cannibalism, as most often it is
the tension between disgust and young women in the narratives who
wonder” in foreign settings (114). become the victims of anthropoph-
Disgust most readily is registered agy. With that exception, Shahani
in the mouth, and food, as an expe- provides an incredibly insightful
riential marker of sameness and colonial reading of these victims and
difference becomes the nadir of their meaning, ending the book on
that disgust. Shahani’s exploration a high note. Overall, Shahani’s book
into the aesthetic of the culinary is brilliant and should be considered
grotesque is both fascinating and a must-read for early modern and
repulsive, as the modern reader food scholars, or really anyone inter-
experiences the same disgust as the ested in a historical understanding
historical narrator. of global foods.
Criticism 63.1-2_17_Tigner.indd Page 183 08/06/21 7:48 pm184 Amy L. Tigner
Professor of English at the University of 2018) and co-edited with David B. Goldstein
Texas, Arlington, Amy L. Tigner has most Culinary Shakespeare (Duquesne
recently written with Allison Carruth University Press, 2017).
Literature and Food Studies (Routledge,
Criticism 63.1-2_17_Tigner.indd Page 184 08/06/21 7:48 pmYou can also read
