Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions
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In Artificial Color, Catherine Keyser examines the early twentieth century phenomenon, wherein US writers became fascinated with modern food--global geographies, nutritional theor…
Book Summary
Catherine Keyser's Artificial Color explores how early 20th-century US writers used modern food technologies—sugar, soda, hydroponics—as imaginative models to challenge racial categories. Analyzing works by Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, Hemingway, Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Hurston, and West, the book reveals food's role in constructing and contesting race, offering a fresh lens on literary modernism and racial fictions.
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About Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions
In Artificial Color, Catherine Keyser examines the early twentieth-century phenomenon wherein US writers became fascinated with modern food—global geographies, nutritional theories, and technological innovations. African American literature of the 1920s and 1930s uses new food technologies as imaginative models for resisting and recasting oppressive racial categories. Jean Toomer's Cane follows sugar from Southern boiling-pots to Northern speakeasies, using effervescent soda to reject the black-white binary in favor of a dream of artificial color and a new American race. George Schuyler's Black Empire associates hydroponics and raw foods with racial hybridity and utopian futures. The second half focuses on white expatriate writers who experienced local food cultures as sensuous encounters with racial others. Hemingway and Stein link regional European races to terroir and aspire to transplantation through connoisseurship. The Fitzgeralds dramatize the white body's susceptibility to wine and coffee; for Scott, culinary corruption produces tragic white masculinity, while for Zelda it exposes the fictitiousness of white feminine purity. Hurston and West expose racism in the global food industry and the precarity of black labor, while insisting on pleasure and vulnerability. Keyser contends that this modern fiction reveals race as unstable and food as a powerful site of invention and interconnection.
Who should read Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions?
This book is essential for scholars and students of American literary modernism, African American literature, and food studies. It will appeal to readers interested in how cultural texts engage with race, technology, and consumption. Historians of food and agriculture will find fresh analyses of early twentieth-century food technologies. Those exploring expatriate modernism, Hemingway, Stein, or the Fitzgeralds will gain new perspectives. General readers fascinated by the intersection of food and racial identity in literature will also find it rewarding.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- ✓ Offers a groundbreaking analysis of food as a central trope in early twentieth-century racial fictions.
- ✓ Brings together African American and white expatriate writers in a compelling comparative framework.
- ✓ Provides original readings of major works by Toomer, Schuyler, Hemingway, Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Hurston, and West.
- ✓ Demonstrates how food technologies shaped imaginative resistance to racial categories.
- ✓ Written in clear, accessible prose that balances theoretical sophistication with close textual analysis.
Cons
- ✗ Assumes familiarity with the literary works and historical context, which may challenge general readers.
- ✗ Focuses exclusively on the early twentieth century, leaving later developments unexplored.
- ✗ Some readers may find the theoretical framework dense in certain chapters.
- ✗ Limited engagement with visual media or non-literary food texts.
- ✗ The comparative structure may feel fragmented to those seeking a single continuous argument.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the main argument of Artificial Color?
Keyser argues that early twentieth-century US writers used modern food technologies and food cultures as imaginative models to resist and recast oppressive racial categories, revealing race as unstable and food as a site of invention and interconnection.
Which authors are discussed in the book?
The book examines works by Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West.
Is this book suitable for undergraduate courses?
Yes, it is appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature, African American studies, and food studies, though instructors may need to provide historical context.
How does the book approach the concept of race?
Keyser treats race as a fiction shaped by cultural and material practices, including food. She shows how writers used food to expose, challenge, and reimagine racial categories.
Does the book include discussion of gender?
Yes, gender is a significant analytical category, especially in the chapters on Zelda Fitzgerald and the white feminine purity ideal, as well as in the attention to labor and embodiment in Hurston and West.
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