Contesting Europe: Comparative Perspectives on Early Modern Discourses on Europe, 1400–1800 — an Introduction

Abstract

sometimes represented as a dangerous Othello-like seducer, with evil designs on wholesome English water. Shahani buttresses her insightful and largely convincing readings of early modern literature with a satisfying array of theoretical supports, from Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s notion of racial indigestion to Arjun Appadurai’s work on globalization. As a result, she is able to tease out new significance from Oberon’s tussles with Titania over the Indian Boy, Prospero’s vanishing banquet, and Oroonoko’s dreadful death. A growing body of research demonstrates that metaphors based on eating were pervasive in this period; in its focus on the culinary language associated with racial or cultural Others, Tasting Difference makes a valuable contribution to this scholarship. Nonetheless, at times its reach exceeds its grasp. Shahani for instance makes the bold assertion that it is in cookbooks, dietary manuals, and literary works that “a conception of racial, cultural and religious difference” is articulated. Surely this is just one place where such conceptions were articulated. The period’s religious writings, to pick just one contrasting example, are (unsurprisingly) also rich in articulations of racial, cultural, and religious difference. It’s a pity that Shahani occasionally felt it necessary to push her argument and material beyond what they are able to sustain, since Tasting Difference succeeds very well in illuminating food’s powerful ability to articulate racial difference in the imaginative works of this period. Her readings of Shakespeare, and works by other familiar and less familiar early modern writers, convincingly reveal how certain foods and the peoples with whom these became associated were “imagined in the literature of the early modern period” (6). Tasting Difference will be read with profit by the now-substantial community of food scholars, and by all those interested in the ways in which “outside histories” in fact form an essential part of any history of the British Isles.