More Bitter Than Sweet: Caribbean Gastrocartographies and Bodies in Exile

Delores B. Phillips (Old Dominion University)

This paper analyzes a Cuban autobiographical cookbook by Maria Urrutia Randelman entitled Memories

of a Cuban Kitchen and a Haitian community cookbook entitled Hope for Haiti by International Child Care,

Inc. to determine how these works differently map the nations they depict in the recipe collections. Using

Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection and Gayatri Spivak’s concepts of haq and subalternity, the paper

contrasts the manner in which these cookbooks outline Caribbean nation-spaces against the ways in

which novels depict conditions of diaspora and exile. The novels under consideration in this presentation

are Edwidge Danticat’s Brother I’m Dying and Reinaldo Arenas’ memoir entitled Before Night Falls, both of

which depict exile and flight in bitter tones, but with different desires for repatriation. Examining these

cookbooks and novels in relation to each other, this presenter will argue that gastrocartographies of the

nations represented in cookbooks map in brightly colored strokes the darker mechanics of exile and

expulsion, which novels reveal in their starkest terms.

Delores B. Phillips - Old Dominion University

Delores B. Phillips earned her PhD at the University of Maryland and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Old Dominion University. Her dissertation entitled “In Questionable Taste: Eating Culture, Cooking Culture in Anglophone Postcolonial Texts” compares culinary autobiographies with depictions of culinary culture in Anglophone postcolonial novels. Her work contests the notion thatcooking and eating unambivalently signify the pleasures of home. By comparing recipes and recipe collections to novels and memoirs, she takes to task the easy cultural traffic that recipes and recipe collections seek to create, deconstructing the depictions of everyday life in postcolonial fiction.