Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence

Women across the Caribbean have been writing, reading, and exchanging cookbooks since at least the turn of the nineteenth century. These cookbooks are about much more than cooking. Through cookbooks, Caribbean women, and a few men, have shaped, embedded, and contested colonial and domestic orders, delineated the contours of independent national cultures, and transformed tastes for independence into flavors of domestic autonomy. Culinary Colonialism, Caribbean Cookbooks, and Recipes for National Independence integrates new documents into the Caribbean archive and presents them in a rare pan-Caribbean perspective. The first book-length consideration of Caribbean cookbooks, Culinary Colonialism joins a growing body of work in Caribbean studies and food studies that considers the intersections of food writing, race, class, gender, and nationality. A selection of recipes, culled from the archive that Culinary Colonialism assembles, allows readers to savor the confluence of culinary traditions and local specifications that connect and distinguish national cuisines in the Caribbean.

Keja Valens is professor of English at Salem State University in Massachusetts. She is the author of Desire between Women in Caribbean Literature and coeditor of Querying Consent: Beyond Permission and Refusal (Rutgers University Press).