Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions by Catherine Keyser (review)

Catherine Keyser's impeccable and exciting study Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions considers the making of race and identity in modernist American fiction by women and men writers of the 1920s and 1930s through the technologies of modern food systems and the troping of food and bodies, positing this making as both "artificial color" and "culinary concoction" (14). While the representation and thematic of food has certainly preoccupied scholars of modernist literature—think of the sustained attention to Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons or the boeuf en daube served forth in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse—newer approaches to food studies have called upon readers to look beyond the table to networks of production and archives of industry and advertising, and to situate texts within the broader nexus of consumer culture. These new approaches have also placed the body and its semi-permeable boundaries, its tastes and sensoria, at the center of what Kyla Wazana Tompkins has called "critical eating studies" (qtd. in Keyser 3), thereby shifting attention to an understanding of "human" as relational, to the experience of anxiety and disgust, and to pleasure as a form of resistance.

As her 2019 editing of a cluster on "Modernist Food Studies" for Modernism/ modernity PrintPlus attests, Keyser is an important figure shaping this critical, theoretical, and methodological ecosystem, and her Artificial Color is a work of complexity and significance that is also, frankly, great fun to read. The author deploys sustained, careful, and creative close readings that make the persuasive argument that "modern food"—"new technologies, global geographies, and dietary regimens"—lays bare "the mutability of the body and the insufficiency of social," particularly racial, "categories that attempt to contain it" (3). These readings are interwoven with and bolstered by archival material that provides evidence for "[t]he connection between food and racial categorization" (10) and for the anxieties circulating around ethnic identity, hybridity, racial ambiguity, physical culture, and conceptualizations of purity. Keyser shows that the growth of industrial food and its related consumer cultures is thoroughly imbricated in, and makes visible, an early-twentieth-century American—and global—racial imaginary. Her work compels us to see race as relational, and the lens of critical eating studies she uses so effectively uncovers the ways "[t] he modern food system—especially as refracted in the literary imagination" calls up an awareness of the body as entangled in heterogeneous "intermixture" (12), rather than a stable, bound entity, the envisioning of such an entity being essential to figuring racial categories and the dismantling of which proved to be so threatening.

Artificial Color's first two chapters concentrate on "food technologies and mixed-race bodies as sites of racial ambiguity and cultural transformation" in the work of Jean Toomer and George Schuyler (13). Schuyler's science fiction and its figure of the New Negro woman is considered alongside the celebrity of his mixed-race daughter and the writing of his wife about diet for the African American press. The next two chapters focus on "the geographies of global food distribution" as rendered in texts by Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Zelda Fitzgerald (13). The final chapter looks beyond the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation to Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West; it also raises the stakes for studying the construction of race through critical eating studies by opening up explicit analysis of the "dramatization of catastrophe and [the] insistence on the precarity of black lives" through representation of black people's economic and social vulnerability in the global food chain (14).

Readers of Legacy will appreciate Keyser's intersectional approach to figures such as Philippa Schuyler, Gertrude Stein, Zelda Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West. In each of these cases, by reading these women subjects and writers through the racial imaginary as made visible by way of the alimentary, Keyser demonstrates how the female body and women's experiences further complicate notions of purity, abjection, and identity...