Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence, by Keja L. Valens, will be available in February 2024 (Rutgers University Press).
Valérie Loichot (author of The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature) writes, “A fascinating exploration of Caribbean creolization, anti-colonialism, and nationhood through the stories and concoctions of women who write and cook: ‘kitchen poets,’ Barbadian American novelist Paule Marshall would have called them.”
Description: Women across the Caribbean have been writing, reading, and exchanging cookbooks since at least the turn of the nineteenth century. These cookbooks are about much more than cooking. Through cookbooks, Caribbean women, and a few men, have shaped, embedded, and contested colonial and domestic orders, delineated the contours of independent national cultures, and transformed tastes for independence into flavors of domestic autonomy. Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence integrates new documents into the Caribbean archive and presents them in a rare pan-Caribbean perspective.
The first book-length consideration of Caribbean cookbooks, Culinary Colonialism joins a growing body of work in Caribbean studies and food studies that considers the intersections of food writing, race, class, gender, and nationality. A selection of recipes, culled from the archive that Culinary Colonialism assembles, allows readers to savor the confluence of culinary traditions and local specifications that connect and distinguish national cuisines in the Caribbean.
Keja Valens holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. She has taught at Salem State University since 2005 where she is currently Professor of English. She teaches and writes on Caribbean literature, literatures of the Americas, feminisms, literary and queer theory, and food writing.
Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence
Keja L. Valens
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, February 2024
504 pages
ISBN 978-1978829541 (pb), 978-1978829558 (hc)
For more information, see https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/culinary-colonialism-caribbean-cookbooks-and-recipes-for-national-independence/9781978829541, https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9781978829541, and https://www.amazon.com/Culinary-Colonialism-Caribbean-Cookbooks-Independence-ebook/dp/B0C5RYYSL1
Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence, by Keja L. Valens, will be available in February 2024 (Rutgers University Press). Valérie Loichot (author of The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature) writes, “A fascinating exploration of Caribbean creolization, anti-colonialism, and nationhood through the stories and concoctions of women who write and
