Johns Hopkins University Press
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  • Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions by Katherine Keyser
Katherine Keyser, Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Modernistic Concoctions: Edible Roots of Race Science in American Fiction

Katherine Keyser's Artificial Color begins with F. Scott Fitzgerald's vision of New York City as a sugar sculpture in The Great Gatsby. It ends with a "pyramid" of groceries—ham, steak, lamb, bacon, sausages, and frankfurters piled on top of "a small crate filled with choice fruits and vegetables"—supplied by the Black Banana King of Boston in Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy (168–69). In each image, abundance teeters on the edge of excess. If White privilege is white sugar—a deracinated extract refined from racialized labor to pure saccharine pleasure—then Black wealth is dead meat—a carnivorous capitalism of patriarchal flesh crushing the small vegetable souls of Black women and clogging the arteries of Black men. Keyser's argument is that modern food—and its attendant systems of growing, picking, slaughtering, shipping, selling, cooking, smelling, tasting, eating, and drinking—are shaped by modern science, including the "science" of race. Food, in turn, shapes the racial imaginary of modern American fiction.

Artificial Color relies implicitly upon the argument, established by Ann Douglas and George Hutchinson among others, that the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism ought to be read together.1 Keyser reads the work of Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West alongside that of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in her analysis of "modern food and racial fictions." The book focuses on novels from the interwar period and US food systems, yet it follows the Lost Generation to Europe and flirts with genre-bending modernist prose. West's 1948 novel and Toomer's 1923 Cane mark the temporal poles of the book, while Schuyler's pulp-sci-fi serial Black Empire and Stein's lyric novel Lucy Church Amiably mark the generic ones, with West functioning as the limit case of late modern realism. For Keyser and her authors, race signifies primarily along a black/white boundary, with Brown bodies serving as the foils against which the modern racial system is built. The "Jewish problem" of European politics of the period is addressed within this American schema, and Orientalism signifies only in passing.

Keyser chose a compelling moment in the history of American eating. The early twentieth century saw the advent of nutrition science in food consumption and industrial science in food production. Vitamins were discovered in these years; canned [End Page 91] food was celebrated for its vitamin content. The Haber-Bosch process fixed nitrogen, birthing the petroleum-based fertilizers of modern agribusiness. Yet the popular imaginary of the period was dominated by the resurgence of "race science" in the form of eugenics.

The most interesting formulation of Keyser's argument suggests a convergence of these three discourses. As she writes in the introduction: "Nutrition science commingled with emergent race theory, sometimes going so far as to propose that food quality could transform racial categorization" (2). Much compelling scholarship has been written recently connecting eugenics and modern literature. Daylanne English's Unnatural Selections, for example, addresses eugenic thought in the same literary circles as Artificial Color.2 Concurrently, the work of food studies scholars, such as Kyla Wazana Tompkins and Psyche Williams-Forson, has done much to elucidate the racial imaginaries of American eating.3 At its best, Keyser's book critiques the multiple embodied discourses of racial formation operating simultaneously in a culinary and scientific register in modern US literature.

In this regard, her chapter on George Schuyler is perhaps the most compelling. It brings together theories of hybridization and miscegenation from agricultural science and eugenics, as well as the raw-food diet of the Schuyler family. Josephine Schuyler's dietary advice to the mothers of "Aframerica" informs Keyser's reading of George Schuyler's hybrid heroines, and the science diet of their mixed-race child-prodigy daughter. Eating is aspirational here, as it is for Stein and Hemingway in their fictions of European ethnic belonging. Yet elsewhere in Keyser's book, particularly in her chapters on the Lost Generation, the affective pull of fictional food outweighs the scientific registers of alimentation.

Still, the book is full of compelling images for the scholar of literature and science. Keyser finds the "medicinal" legacy of Coca-Cola and the alchemical figure of the druggist behind the soda fountain in Jean Toomer's writing. Black bodies laboring in the machine of industrial soda production lead us to the laboratory-like "Kitchen of Tomorrow" at the 1939 World's Fair (24, 55). Sugar caramelizes into sticky syrups of racial abjection in Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz, while art-deco advertisements promise the tropical esprit of Brazilian coffee. The figure of Gertrude Stein hunting mushrooms in the French countryside suggests a buried ecological argument, akin to Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World.4

Botanical metaphors proliferate. American viniculture betrays failures of racial transplantation for Hemingway, Toomer complains about cucumbers in seed catalogs, and for Schuyler the modern mulatta is a miscegenated strawberry, a tempting genetic hybrid. There are hydroponic farms and abandoned potato fields. Crates of celery and bananas compete with images of women as exotic fruit, while dreams of scientific eating give way to kidney disease caused by systemic malnutrition.

Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions speaks most clearly in the field of food studies. Its articulation of modern literature's investment in the sciences of food [End Page 92] production and consumption, and its use of those discourses to elucidate the roots of contemporary US racial politics, recommend it to the scholar of science studies. Even if you don't read it while eating, you'll start seeing food in all your books.

Kim Adams
Pennsylvania State University
Kim Adams

Kim Adams is a Humanities in the World postdoctoral fellow at the Pennsylvania State University Humanities Institute. Her book project, Building the Body Electric, follows the application of electricity to the human body in American literature and medicine from the Civil War to the Civil Rights era. She is invested in work that combines material history with theoretical stakes to evoke practical consequences.

Footnotes

1. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995); George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1995).

2. Daylanne English, Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: U. North Carolina Press, 2004).

3. Kyla Wazana Thompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: NYU Press, 2012); Psyche Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, & Power (Chapel Hill: U. North Carolina Press, 2006).

4. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 2015). Keyser references Tsing on p. 96 but does not explore the argument.

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