Decolonizing Food: Transgressive Eating in Junot Díaz’s Drown

Abstract:This essay places Junot Díaz’s first collection of short stories about immigration and the diasporic experience in conversation with recent scholarship in the field of food studies, and situates the book’s treatment of what Kyla Wazana Tompkins terms “eating culture” within theorizations of Díaz’s decolonial imagination. Moments of eating, digesting, and expelling in Drown critique the epistemic and embodied histories of colonial domination and white supremacy. Resisting the assimilation to which the diasporic subject must presumably aspire, these acts of eating serve as decolonial ruptures. Drown challenges us, in an era of increased mobility and global food consciousness, to consider how foodways pave the paths of the mobile, exposing unequal sociopolitical realities and mapping productive ways of taking these seemingly intractable forces to task.