In an interview with Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson on “the limits of digestion,” Jacques Derrida suggests that “tropes of cannibalism” are ubiquitous in Western thought. “Eating is, after all, the great mystery of Christianity,” he notes. “The transubstantiation occurs in the act of incorporation itself: bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ.”Footnote ¹ Given this, it is not difficult to conclude, as he does in “Eating Well,” that the ethical imperative passes through, indeed begins with, the mouth. The injunction/duty to eat well involves the rule of “infinite hospitality,” of “determining the best, most respectful, most grateful, and also most giving way of relating to the other and of relating the other to the self.”Footnote ²

Kyla Wazana Tompkins's Racial Indigestion is a book that inhabits a conceptual universe informed by Derrida's thinking about anthropophagy in particular and sacrifice in general. Beginning with a vaudeville-inspired silent film about the swallowing whole (and subsequent rescue) of a black child, she invites us to ponder the curious and persistent image of “the edible and delicious black subject” (1) in the high culture and the popular entertainments of the long nineteenth century in the United States. An image such as this one invites consideration of the logic of racial embodiment, and of the distinctive ways in which cultures of food and eating came to imbue thinking about nation formation and racial difference. The evidence of “mouths and bodies, of eaters and the eaten” (1) in a sizable and varied archive also underlines the limits of a purely or primarily epidermal understanding of racial distinction. A racial ontology predicated on the visual markers of skin colour and facial features must be supplemented by a focus on practices that might be designated orificial – a term that for Tompkins encompasses both ends of the alimentary canal (though not, as in the case of Derrida, the ear or the eye). From the evidence of this book, the colour line in nineteenth-century America clearly travelled through the mouth and the digestive tract, and was formed through this itinerary; eating was, as the author notes perspicaciously, “a racially performative act” (11). The meaning of this racial theatre was rarely straightforward, however. If the archive lays bare the sadism of an American racism that sees the black body as food, Tompkins underscores the fact that eating was no guarantee of ingestion or smooth passage; indigestion, as the book's title suggests, was as much a product of racialized voracity as was incorporation. One of the pleasures of the book is this counterintuitive evaluation of what a symbolic anthropophagy might generate.

Five dense chapters, chronologically arranged, cover a great deal of ground. Tompkins begins with texts from the early decades of the republic – children's tales, servants' memoirs, essays by Hawthorne and Melville, cookbooks, and works of domestic advice – to describe the emergence of a domestic architecture that designated the kitchen as the zone of foreignness and contagion in the bourgeois home. This was especially the case in an era that saw an increase in the employment of domestic servants – often of Irish or African American origin – and the recoil of bourgeois women to the parlour. The kitchen became a staging ground for the almost vertiginous lability of the bourgeois body; it was where it was confronted, through the medium of cooking and through proximity to raced others, with all kinds of declensions.

An anxiety about safeguarding a whiteness all too liable to racial–civilizational and sexual debility was, not surprisingly, the focus of the dietetic reform movement of the 1830s associated with Sylvester Graham. For Graham, bread was a densely freighted symbol of national well-being in an era when diet came to be correlated forcefully with the exercise of political and especially imperial power. In his eyes, the American diet had come to be characterized by a “gross and promiscuous feeding” that was none other than a form of venereal indulgence – what Tompkins names a “queer alimentarity” (68). An anti-masturbatory and nationally regenerative programme had to be grounded in a “farinaceous rule” that insisted on the superior properties of bread from the nutritive and moral standpoint and repudiated “foreign” foods such as coffee, tea, sugar, spices, and wine as tending to bodily degeneracy (85).

Foreignness may have been apt to be rejected, but certain proximate others were seen all too often as suitable for consumption. A chapter on a trio of antebellum novels – The House of the Seven Gables, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Our Nig – anatomizes quite expertly the “mouthwork” (to use Sarah Guyer's phrase) of the texts on black edibility. An extended reading in this chapter of the boy Ned Higgins's cannibalistic, miscegenated, and even queer desire for Jim Crow cookies in Hawthorne's novel is a wonderfully illuminating and quite unanticipated gloss on “an alimentary desire for interracial contact” (100).

The best part of Racial Indigestion is a long final chapter on an archival trove of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century chromolithographed trade cards advertising a variety of food products. The cards are remarkable in the variety of racial actors and scenarios they showcase, and so, simply as an act of archival recovery alone, the chapter performs a most useful service. But Tompkins brings to these cards an analytic subtlety that is little short of dazzling. Refusing to read them as in any way self-evident, she draws attention to their embeddedness in the idioms of vaudeville, minstrelsy, carnival, and other performative traditions. The “muddled and unstable mix of identification, desire, and disgust” that constitutes spectatorship for these cards demands that we modulate our automatically censorious readings of racist affect (180). Moreover, these cards might plausibly be seen as gesturing toward a newly urban spectatorship of black women and men, now subjects of commodity consumption and not only its abjected outside.

If there is a weakness in this otherwise bracing and intelligent book, it is that Tompkins does not explain sufficiently the principles that govern the choice of some texts and figures rather than others. Her chapter on the feminist and transnational afterlives of the Grahamite ideology in Louisa May Alcott's post-Civil War writings is certainly competent but does not add anything conceptually to the project as a whole. And her gloss on contemporary food movements seems both trifling and unnecessary. A book as smart as this one need not suffer from any anxiety about its own relevance or about its considerable allure.