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Introduction: food in multi-ethnic literatures.

Article Excerpt
The language of food fills the pages of multi-ethnic literatures of the United States. Food tropes, metaphors, and images serve as figures of speech which depict celebrations of families and communities, portray identity crises, create usable histories to establish ancestral connections, subvert ideology and practices of assimilation, and critique global capitalism. In the United States, relationships between food and ethnicity bear historical, social, cultural, economic, political, and psychological significance, in other words, ethnic identity formations have been shaped by experiences of food productions and services, culinary creativities, appetites, desires, hunger, and even vomit, This special issue of MELUS presents seven essays that centralize the multivalent meaning of food in various ethnic literary traditions, such as African American, Arab American, Asian American, Italian American, and Caribbean writing.

Until recently, there had been little work done on the subject of food and American culture. The most celebrated writer has been M. F. K. Fisher, whose articles and personal essays on cooking are among the best literary renditions of food. A number of essay collections that have been published since the late 1980s, including Literary Gastronomy (1988), edited by David Bevan, Cooking by the Book: Food in Literature and Culture (1989), edited by Mary Anne Schofield, Gian-Paolo Biasin's The Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel (1993), Susanne Skubal's Word of Mouth: Food and Fiction after Freud (2002), and Denise Gigante's Taste: A laterary History (2005), are single-author volumes that seriously consider the role that food plays in literature. None of these books explore the role that food and foodways play in ethnic American literature, however. Recently a few books have focused on the relationships between food and ethnic literatures and cultures, and each of them deals with a single ethnicity, such as Doris Witt's Black Hunger: Food and the Polilics of U.S. Identity (1999), Andrew Warnes' Hunger Overcome? Food and Resistance in Twenteeth-Century African American Literature (2004), and Jennifer Ann Ho's Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (2005). Two journals, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, edited by Dara Goldstein, and Alimentum: The Literature of Food, edited by Paulette Licitra and Peter Selgin, have appeared; these journals consider the diversity of American cuisine and its impact on...

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