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3 / Sugar and Spice: Sweetening the Taste of Alterity Undoubtedly, one can write while eating more easily than one can speak while eating, but writing goes further in transforming words into things capable of competing with food. —gilles deleuze and felix guattari, “what is a minor literature?” Life without candy is unfathomable for Americans today. —jane dusselier, “bonbons, lemon drops and oh henry! bars” Despite the eventual failure of Triton and Ranjan’s relationship in Reef, the earliest gestures toward intimacy are marked through the sharing of love cake. Charmaine Solomon’s classic tome on Asian cooking suggests that love cake might well be the most coveted and contentious of confections because it reigns supreme as the confectionery choice of many as well as the confection with the most variations known to cooks in the Sri Lankan diaspora. For Mala in Cereus Blooms at Night, baking a cake for Ambrose allows her to express her desire for him. Establishing networks of intimacy enabled through shared consumption becomes an overt marker of desire. But sweets and confections buttress more complex and heterogeneous narratives than ones that simply mark desire. In a more politically charged sense, sweetness signifies much more than mere desire. Sidney Mintz’s wonderful exploration of the relationship between sweetness and power began the important work of understanding sugar and sweetness to be inextricably linked to relations of colonial power. Indo-Trinidadian author Ramabai Espinet notes that the desire for sweetness was a major force compelling the flow of labor from the Indian subcontinent to Trinidad. In her novel The Swinging Bridge, the nation-state is translated playfully but with powerful political resonance as “Chinidad, land of sugar” (3–4). The West’s pursuit of sugar and spices has subjugated populations of laborers—first through African slavery and later through policies of indentureship of Indians and Chinese populations. This history of inequity demands a thorough examination 82 / palatable multiculturalisms and class critique of how the politics of production buttresses the aesthetics of food writing . With its moorings within a matrix of colonial power and production , sugar is inextricably linked to consumptive practices. Indeed, it was the high demand for sugar in the West that set in motion the wheels of colonialism, which systematically garnered strength from shackling the bodies of colonized subjects into the exploitative world of sugar plantation labor. “Sweetness,” however, is not restricted to palatal matters but often extends into epistemologies about constructing modes of reality. As such, what might be the literal or discursive strategies available to authors to address the politics of consumption? In Asian American literary studies, the concept of food pornography has most frequently spoken to processes of cultural consumption and the commodification of ethnicity. Food pornography names the ethical project of writers who commodify and exoticize minoritized cultures for mainstream readers using an Orientalist understanding of food as a signifier of difference. Originating from The Year of the Dragon, a play by the well-known Chinese American playwright Frank Chin, the term “food pornography” can be defined as an exploitative form of self-Orientalism in which Asian American subjects highlight the “exotic” nature of their foodways by exaggerating the terms of their otherness. It is considered a form of cultural self-commodification through which Asian Americans earn a living by capitalizing on the so-called exoticism embedded in one’s foodways. As Sau-Ling Wong notes, food pornography superficially appears to promote rather than devalue one’s ethnic heritage, but “what [it does] in fact do is to wrench cultural practices out of their context and display them for gain to the curious gaze of outsiders” (56). To write about food, then, is to enable a form of cultural consumption with Asian Americanness taking on the role of commodity-comestible. But as books acquire the status of commodities subject to consumption , it becomes imperative to consider other models of consumption. Following Jean Baudrillard, we might conceptualize an alternative mode of consuming difference, a type of consumptive practice in which actual eating is jettisoned in favor of alternative forms of consumption— visual, olfactory, and psychic. “Hyperreal eating” becomes a useful form of critical scaffolding in that it names the consumer as a necessary part of the exchange between commodity, consumer, and cultural broker. It speaks to the desire of the consumer who subscribes to a politics of multiculturalist eating—the notion that eating widely can overcome racial difference—as well as to the practice of simulating eating without physically ingesting food. This process...

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