Taste, Manners, and Miscegenation: French Racial Politics in the US

A prequel:

A French gourmand, in flight from political turmoil at home, arrives in post-Revolutionary America with a taste for satire, a Rabelaisian eye for folly, and a gargantuan appetite for turkey. Journeying from the Francophone enclave of Philadelphia to the "backwoods" of Hartford, he enjoys the hospitality of a Mr. Bulow, "a worthy old American farmer," and his "four buxom daughters, for whom our arrival was a great event" (Brillat-Savarin 77). Having charmed his hosts, he enjoys still more success as a member of their shooting party, bagging the prize turkey for "sport." Afterwards, the gourmand makes sport of one of the most widely noted mannerisms of Americans, the childlike but grating chauvinism for their nation that stops every conversation in its tracks. True to form, his American host foregoes the customary bon voyage wishes in order to drill into his departing guest the national creation myth. His own well-tended estate, he reminds his French visitor, pays eloquent tribute to the providential system of mild laws and low taxes that has rewarded the labor of self-sufficient yeomen like him. He means to leave his listener with the thrilling prospect of continual, self-perpetuating prosperity, but all the gourmand has heard is a steady droning in his ear. "I was thinking," he recalls as he rode away, "of how I would cook my turkey" (81).

In The Physiology of Taste (1825), an eccentric philosophical treatise on cookery, cuisine, and conviviality, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin made quick work of the Americanist commentary that so many of his fellow travelers inscribed into their narratives of North American travel. The most well known of these French travel writers, Jean de Crevecoeur and Alexis de Tocqueville, used their narratives to generate the synthetic, formalized images of democracy—the pervasive equality of condition; the assimilation of foreign emigrants; the vitality of civil society—that contemporaries like Mr. Bulow and subsequent generations of American citizens employed to express their sense of national belonging.¹Letters from an American Farmer (1782) and Democracy in America (1835, 1840) have equally proved useful to a pre- and post-war generation of Americanist scholars, providing them with the distinctive historiography, sociology, and political theory of a national liberal tradition. In this capacity, the Franco-American travel narrative has served not just as a privileged Americanist archive but as a virtual starting point for the self-conception of the field of American studies.²

And yet, the French commentator who could climax the saga of the venerable American farmer with the thought of his next meal and comically invert the priorities of citizenship with the appeal of roasted turkey can better reveal the incongruous, even adverse interest of his fellow travelers in the articulation of American democracy. Brillat-Savarin's entertaining little anecdote in fact tells an allegory about the pleasures of taste that underwrote not just the critical method and vocabulary of the travelogue genre but the counter-democratic liberal politics which gave two generations of French travel writers their vocation and stake in the US. The comic encounter of the gourmand and the citizen is thus a good place to begin a literary-historical inquiry that would reverse the nationalist appropriation of the Franco-American travel narrative, reinstate its foreignness, and retrieve its Americanist discourse from the self-representation of the American citizen.

In Brillat-Savarin's rendition of this allegory, the exhibition of taste operates as a fundamentally incongruous moment within a civic ritual of self-fashioning, a differend within a rapidly foreclosing liberal consensus, and—perhaps most importantly—an expression of cultural estrangement that is meant to resonate beyond the misalliance of citizen and gourmand and indicate a still more fatal incommensurability. A broader survey of the travel narrative genre indeed suggests that Brillat-Savarin's was the exception that proved the rule, and that many other French travel writers took the logical next step of counterpoising their own ironic detachment from the American citizen, the ideological and structural condition for the experience of aesthetic pleasure, with the exclusion of Native Americans and African...