Jan 30th 2017
Triggering passages:
“Each of Graham’s terms here- depravity, grossness, perversity, incorrigibility, outrage- implies that social disorder is the inevitable result of indulging in the senses at the expense of virtuous behaviors oriented toward upholding orderly systems of feeling, being, and acting. Improper eating is, in this symbolic economy, a mode of “sensualism” that is described with the same language as forms of “venereal” indulgence and is linked as a practice, through highly racialized language, to the question of the nation’s “posterity.”” (Tompkins 2012: 69)
“The disparity was clear: cotton was for the rich and powerful; corn was for the poor. Corn was the main staple of slave diets (the standard ration of corn for slaves was a peck of corn a week, or about 2 pounds of corn a day).” (Newman 2013: 32)
News Media Context:
Starbucks Plan to Hire 10,000 Refugees Spurs Calls For Boycott
“I am hearing the alarm you all are sounding that the civility and human rights we have all taken for granted for so long are under attack,” Schultz said in his note. “We are living in an unprecedented time, one in which we are witness to the conscience of our country, and the promise of the American Dream, being called into question.”
Response:
Sylvester Graham’s designation of food and people classified as “foreign” or “exotic” as a threat to the white American body is an idea that the United States has not yet shaken. The “spiced” bodies Graham refers to are easily understood today as immigrant bodies, that when removed from their homeland (where they can live their lives as “noble savages”) become a threat when existing on American turf, in turn “opening the home (America) up to the possibility of infection” (Tompkins 2012: 81) or indigestion caused by too much spice or “otherness”.
In Newman’s second chapter “A Commodity That Built a Nation” I was struck by her observation of the disparity that existed between corn and other crops like wheat and cotton and her indication of corn’s use as animal feed, as well as its place as the main staple of slave diets. Perhaps in that diet existed a conscious desire of making that otherness more bland and palatable to the white body while enforcing racial and class hierarchies.
Given the context of current political happenings, it is hard not to compare Graham’s designation of alternative forms of consumption and being as “depraved” “gross” and “perverse” with Donald Trump’s designation of Muslim and Hispanic immigrants as a corrupt, perverted threat to the American vision of chaste whiteness.