Introduction: Genealogies of Edibility in Global Culture

Abstract

The things that we eat, and consider edible, are products of particular histories, technologies of power, and institutions of knowledge that have made the foreign familiar. This special issue historicizes modern moments of knowledge formation and rupture to interrogate how meanings of edibility have been negotiated through processes of identity-making over time and across global space. Scholars have shown how edibility, as a flexible cultural category, often emerges as a site of power relations through which the terms of incorporating the Other are worked out. 1 Such approaches often focus on eating as a discursive practice. In her field-opening work on the visceral politics of bodies, race, and ingestion, Kyla Wazana Tompkins urges us to develop "critical eating studies" and move away from the commodity fetishization of food. 2 Fabio Parasecoli similarly prioritizes cultural processes of eating and ingesting in writing that food, as a medium of intercultural communication, necessitates that "various materials become edible objects only in their relation with a community of knowing (and eating) subjects. " 3 Contributors to this issue extend this view, but they do so by shifting the focus to material sites of global encounter, revealing how empire builders, foreign travelers, scientists, industrialists, food preparers, and consumers have made sense of the unfamiliar by folding sensory interactions into narratives of collective identity and differentiation. By tracing circulations and contestationsof people, plant matter, recipes, colonial epistemologies, innovations, and scientific knowledgefrom the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, they throw into light the ways in which the categories of edible and inedible are products of historically contingent power relations. As such, the articles included here recuperate the tools of commodity biography to discursive historical analysis of national, colonial, and ethnic identity. 4 This approach helps unravel some of the ways in which the making and unmaking of edibility, as a process, moves substances through systems that include consumption and eating, but that also encompass exploration, production, innovation, and deconstruction. 5 In the following pages, the systems are not only globalized, they also cross-cut Western and non-Western cultures to produce communities of sameness or of difference. By telling the stories of particular substances that have come to be known as food (or not), each of the authors highlight how institutions-such as empire, capitalism, science and technology-have mediated the familiar and the foreign. 6 Visceral moments of domestication and differentiation, when located within specific historical trajectories, illuminate how notions of edibility entail far-reaching implications for a variety of domains, such as food sovereignty, nationalized cultural identity, and postcolonial public health. Durian, a spiky fruit with pungent aromas of ripeness and decay, presents a counterexample to the narrative of colonial commoditization of the tropic...