Artificial Color (Paperback)

Catherine Keyser

ISBN 10: 0197620183 / ISBN 13: 9780197620182

Published by Oxford University Press Inc, New York, 2021

About this Item

Paperback. In Artificial Color, Catherine Keyser examines the early twentieth century phenomenon, wherein US writers became fascinated with modern food--global geographies, nutritional theories, and technological innovations. African American literature of the 1920s and 1930s uses new food technologies as imaginative models for resisting and recasting oppressive racial categories. In his masterwork Cane (1923), Jean Toomer follows sugar from the boiling-potsof the South to the speakeasies of the North. Through effervescent and colorful soda, he rejects the binary of black and white in favor of a dream of artificial color and a new American race. In his serial sciencefiction, Black Empire (1938-39), George Schuyler associates hydroponics and raw foods with racial hybridity and utopian futures. The second half of the book focuses on white expatriate writers who experienced local food cultures as sensuous encounters with racial others. Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein associate regional European races with the ideal of terroir and aspire to transplantation through their own connoisseurship. In their novels set in theMediterranean, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald both dramatize the white body's susceptibility to intoxicating and stimulating substances like wine and coffee. For Scott Fitzgerald, the climatological and culinarycorruption of the South produces the tragic fall of white masculinity. For Zelda, by contrast, it exposes the destructiveness and fictitiousness of the white feminine purity ideal. During the Great Depression and the Second World War, African American writers Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West exposed the racism that shaped the global food industry and the precarity of black labor. Their engagement with food, however, insisted upon pleasure as well as vulnerability, the potential of sensuousflesh and racial affiliation. In its embrace of invention and interconnection, Catherine Keyser contends, this modern fiction reveals that, far from being stable, whiteness may bethe most obviously artificial color of them all. This book examines how modern US writers used the changing geographies, regimens, and technologies of modern food to reimagine racial classification and to question its relationship to the mutable body. By challenging a cultural ideal of purity, this literature proposes that racial whiteness is perhaps the most artificial color of them all. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780197620182

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Artificial Color (Paperback)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, New York
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0197620183
• ISBN 13: 9780197620182
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

In Artificial Color, Catherine Keyser examines the early twentieth century phenomenon, wherein US writers became fascinated with modern food--global geographies, nutritional theories, and technological innovations. African American literature of the 1920s and 1930s uses new food technologies as imaginative models for resisting and recasting oppressive racial categories. In his masterwork Cane (1923), Jean Toomer follows sugar from the boiling-pots of the South to the speakeasies of the North. Through effervescent and colorful soda, he rejects the binary of black and white in favor of a dream of artificial color and a new American race. In his serial science fiction, Black Empire (1938-39), George Schuyler associates hydroponics and raw foods with racial hybridity and utopian futures.

The second half of the book focuses on white expatriate writers who experienced local food cultures as sensuous encounters with racial others. Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein associate regional European races with the ideal of terroir and aspire to transplantation through their own connoisseurship. In their novels set in the Mediterranean, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald both dramatize the white body's susceptibility to intoxicating and stimulating substances like wine and coffee. For Scott Fitzgerald, the climatological and culinary corruption of the South produces the tragic fall of white masculinity. For Zelda, by contrast, it exposes the destructiveness and fictitiousness of the white feminine purity ideal. During the Great Depression and the Second World War, African American writers Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West exposed the racism that shaped the global food industry and the precarity of black labor. Their engagement with food, however, insisted upon pleasure as well as vulnerability, the potential of sensuous flesh and racial affiliation.

In its embrace of invention and interconnection, Catherine Keyser contends, this modern fiction reveals that, far from being stable, whiteness may be the most obviously artificial color of them all.

About the Author

Catherine Keyser is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and the author of Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture (Rutgers University Press 2010).