“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well," notes the narrator in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Amidst an increasing focus on gut health, sustainable food systems, food sovereignty, food (in)security, and other social (and social media) topics, the place of food in literature and culture has come in for renewed interest in scholarship that goes beyond the gustatory text. How do a range of literary forms (fiction, nonfiction, cookbooks) and visual media help us imagine the significant ways in which food relates to our lived experience? If food has power, as Anthony Bourdain insists in Kitchen Confidential, how does literature reveal its power?
Supriya M. Nair is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She is the author of two monographs, Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History and Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours. She is also co-editor of Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism and editor of Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature. She regularly teaches courses on Food and Culture at the University of Michigan.
Speaker will be presenting in-person and streamed live through Zoom
