ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION An Imperial Diet: From Cacao to Coconuts-Representing Edible Bodies in the Americas from the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Tashima Thomas
unpublished
This dissertation endeavors to prove through a series of visual mediations that the alimentary tract signifies a gastropoetical dialectic between the eater and the eaten. Alimentary discourse is capable of developing a visual language that illustrates the interiority of appetites of empire through the politics of provender. In this study sugar, cacao, pineapples, and coconuts operate as a lens to view the scaffolding of social and artistic strategies. This project is committed to the excavation
more » ... of image construction, the visual representation of the African Diaspora in the Americas, and understanding the formation of gastronomical narratives through colonial discourse. Anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz suggests that anthropology has the capabilities to answer the outside and inside meanings of food pathways; but so far it has not done so. This dissertation will be able to offer insight into these issues. In a way, this work calls out what I consider obvious omissions regarding the connections between art history, the visual archive, and tropical food pathways by clearly articulating the power of these foods to transform cultures of vision and the induction of a modern world system. Ultimately, my dissertation offers a critical study of race, gender, sexuality, transnational, and transhistorical food pathways. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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