Feasts, Famines, Revolutions: The Hungry Nineteenth Century
This course reimagines the long nineteenth century as one driven by its hunger. Focusing on various manifestations of hunger in this period—famines, feasts, food riots, and rebellions—provides a global and visceral understanding of nineteenth-century history, culture, and politics. We begin by evaluating the revolution of regimes and tastes during the French Revolution, a period marked by food shortages, the rise of gastronomy, and the figure of the gourmand. Then, we examine the subject of literal and metaphorical sweetness vis-à-vis sugar and the enslaved bodies that produced it in the textual and visual archives of British and French Abolition. Next, we move from the French Revolution to the Haitian Revolution to weave together a gustatory understanding of Abolitionist rhetoric with representations of the first successful rebellion against enslavement. We see how the vampiric alimentary logic of transatlantic enslavement and global capitalism emerge as interrelated phenomena. A careful analysis of hunger, starvation, and migration follows, ushered in by the potato failures of the 1840s, particularly devastating in Ireland. We then study the role that tea and beef play in the self-representation of both Britain and its colonized subjects. Finally, we close with a discussion of how gastronomy, in the hands of fin de siècle writers, develops into texts and tropes of desire, decadence, and disease.
Texts covered will include: writings by gastronomes and food critics like Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière, Jean-Anthleme Brillat-Savarin, and Elizabeth Robins Pennell; essays and pamphlets by Charles Lamb and William Fox; memoirs and novels by authors like Olaudah Equiano, Uriah Derick D’arcy, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Rudyard Kipling; short stories and plays by Mrs. Hoare, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, and Krishna Mohana Banerjea’s; and, poetry by Henry Meredith Parker and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
This course received a Graduate Student Course Development Grant from the Center for European Studies at the University of Florida. Students in this course also developed a public-facing food history page on Instagram. You can read about the history of passionfruit, biscuits, pepper, plantain, goulash, colonial cookbooks, the afterlife of the Irish Potato Famine, and more on @feasts.famines.revolutions!
Image Details:
Section tile (on previous page): Daniel Spoerri, The Seville Series No. 16 (1991), MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, https://muzea.malopolska.pl/en/objects-list/1141.
Right: “Tom Raw Between Smoke and Fire,” Illustration from Anonymous, Tom Raw (R. Ackermann, 1828).