ABSTRACT

Food Studies, as an area of academic enquiry and in terms of a more popular readership, has arguably never been so buoyant. However, relatively few studies address the relationship between food and literature, and even fewer do this in a Caribbean context. Strikingly, in her essay, “Food and Literature: An Overview” (2012) Joan Fitzpatrick fails to mention a single non-European text or study, other than a fleeting mention of a critical essay on curry in a Victorian text set in India (Sen 2008); indeed, in Fitzpatrick’s account ‘literature’ is both thoroughly canonical and exclusively British. This oversight in an apparently international handbook reveals the double blind spots of current food studies: an unquestioning canonicity in many studies on food and literature, and a rather problematic concept of the connection between food and writing as a symptomatic or corroborative rather than more complex relationship. This chapter addresses these lacunae by proposing that we read the relationship between food and literature in the Anglophone Caribbean as part of a “call and response between food and culture” (Lakhan 2008) in a culturally specific, Caribbean context.