Year: 2023
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Imagining through and alongside food in colonial and post-colonial contexts like Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba carries a political and aesthetic capacity that is useful for understanding not only the Caribbean, but global politics and aesthetics originating in slave-based plantation economy. On this intersection I find sabor (taste/flavor) as a mediated sensorial link into material forms of imagination and self-making. Sabor is an archive of sensorial memories people in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba rely on and reproduce in the moment we imagine food and begin to associate and produce culinary images from other sensibilities: the tongue, sounds, and smells. This embodied imagination, I argue, proposes a political praxis of relation and place-making through the sensorial. In this dissertation I examine Cuban, Haitian, Dominican, and Puerto Rican food texts through multimodal text analysis and study the multi-sensoriality of sabor represented in visual culture and written texts from the 1940s to the present to highlight modes of self-fashioning, practices of memory, and the techniques of creative survival articulated through food culture. Each chapter in this dissertation follow one instance in the production of sabor: memory as understood through spatial practices and coexisting temporalities, hunger, silences, enjoyment, and pleasure. In chapter one, the works of Edwidge Danticat, María Dolores “Lula” de Jesús, and Viña “La Gran Pastelera” Hernández contest colonial and modern ordering of temporalities and space. Chapter two analyzes works by Jacques Romain, Antonio José Ponte, Nitza Villapol and Cuban exile news platform CiberCuba, to explore hunger as a tool for producing, controlling, and violating bodies in the Caribbean. In chapter three, cookbooks by Carmen Aboy Valldejuli, Berta Cabanillas et al., Amanda Ornes vda. de Perelló, Ligia de Bornia, Niniche Viard Gaillard, and Nitza Villapol, and a food blog by Ilana Benady and Clara González, make use of the uncertainty inherent to recipes to craft culinary imaginaries that often stem from racial and ethnocultural narratives in the Caribbean. Chapter four investigates texts by Nitza Villapol and Margot Bacallao, Ana Lydia Vega, and Dudley Alexis to study how food provides a medium for embodying joy and pleasure as a way of relating to the political. The goal of this dissertation is to highlight how ways of living in the Caribbean that stem from culinary cultures contest colonial organizations of the sensorial and propose modes of relating outside of the modern Caribbean nation.
DOI: 10.26153/tsw/64234
Author: Ocasio Vega, Monica B
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7168583367
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