An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States by Lauren F. Klein (review)

Theories of the archive in early American literary studies and critical race studies often converge on the boundary between archival scarcity and abundance. Scarcity: the textual scraps, silences, fragments, or outright exclusions of marginalized narratives in the early national archives of the United States. Abundance: in possibilities, for the unruly knowledges and theories that we might derive from such archival remnants and spaces; and for methods of interpretation that thwart structures of archival constraint that occlude racialized and otherwise marginalized lives. Theories of archival scarcity and abundance both feed early Americanist desires for expanding our horizons of knowledge about the past and modes of addressing loss incurred by the violent legacies of national founding. Lauren F. Klein's An Archive of Taste opens critical conversations about early national literary and cultural archives—as scarcity and abundance—through an insightful elaboration of a practical rule familiar to any researcher who steps into the institutional space of an archive: "There is no eating in the archive" (1). The discourses of taste that Klein explores across recipe books, household and shipping inventories, letters, and other textual forms demonstrate that concepts of nation, citizenship, republicanism, and political society developed through contested theories and experiences of eating. In turn, these experiences shape the material, aesthetic, and discursive cultivation of taste. Across all five chapters, Klein discerns an abundant archive of taste, even as her capacious analysis confronts that archive's unique risks of perishability.

An Archive of Taste interrogates both the material conditions of taste and the aesthetic debates that produce an early national concept of "republican taste." In the introduction, Klein defines the discourse of republican taste as "a commitment to the virtues of simplicity, temperance, and moderation" linked to the civic ideals of republicanism (4). Discourses of tasteful consumption fed into an early national project that sought to produce self-regulating citizens in accordance with Enlightenment ideologies. The "tastefulness" of the autonomous and property-owning citizen of the early republic was cultivated at the dining table, through interactions, appetites, judgments, and skills exercised there. Klein's focus on the sensory features of taste not only brings into view political acts of eating and cooking, but it also reorients political constructions of taste toward the contributions by racialized and enslaved subjects. Klein's study weaves together the insights of multiple fields, including early US national literature, food studies, and critical race studies. Her wide-ranging analytical approach mixes methods of close reading, historical analysis, and speculative modes of theorizing textual scraps from the archive and engaging with digital humanities tools for data visualization. All five chapters interrogate a dominant conception of republican taste alongside understudied and potentially subversive features of the discourse, with each chapter examining interconnected questions about embodiment, knowledge production, race, and political participation through the main concepts that inform divergent discourses of taste: "Appetite" (chapter 2), "Satisfaction" (chapter 3), "Imagination" (chapter 4), and "Absence" (chapter 5).

The first and second chapters of An Archive of Taste attend to the tensity between elevated cultivations of republican taste and the disavowed practices of Black taste that correlate with national constructions of racial hierarchies. Chapter 1 examines two pairs of the nation's founding fathers (Thomas Jefferson and James Madison) and the men they enslaved for domestic labor (James Hemings, cook for the Jeffersons, and Paul Jennings, personal valet for Madison). Through close readings of the personal correspondence between Jefferson and Madison, emancipation agreements, and other textual forms, the first chapter interrogates how the founders' understandings of aesthetic and political taste are tethered to the tasteful, culinary expertise of those they enslaved. Both Jefferson and Madison abstract republican taste from the physical labors and culinary knowledges of Black taste that nonetheless surrounded the highest ranks of national power. Klein discerns how the nation's political leaders deploy metaphors of cultivation—based on ideals of self-sufficient, subsistence agriculture—to deracinate the refinement of taste from...