Triggering Passages:
“In the era of conspicuous consumption, the “too-muchness” of the black and Asian bodies as represented in these trade cards is of key importance. The affective excess and semiotic overload of these images encode the use of disgust to facilitate and accompany the white bourgeois consumer’s disavowal and enjoyment of commodity pleasure.” (Tompkins 2012: 150)
“Against the liberal tendency to look away from racism we must look at these images- classic examples of racial kitsch- not only to render their historical weight visible and material but also to recognize both sides of their terrible ambivalence… It is, after all, only by looking and listening, by paying close attention to these cards through and in the strangeness of our historical distance from them, that we can begin to hear their ambiguities.” (Tompkins 2012: 151)
“They claim the body of the colored Other instrumentally, as unexplored terrain, a symbolic frontier that will be fertile ground for their reconstruction of the masculine norm, for asserting themselves as transgressive desiring subjects. They call upon the Other to be both witness and participant in this transformation.” (Bell Hooks, 1992: 368)
“People do not eradicate the politics of racial domination as they are made manifest in personal interaction. Mutual recognition of racism, its impact both on those who are dominated and those who dominate, is the only standpoint that makes possible an encounter between races that is not based on denial and fantasy. For the ever present reality of racist domination, of white supremacy, that renders problematic the desire of white people to have contact with the Other.” (Bell Hooks, 1992: 371)
News Media Context:
“When we call a food ethnic, we are signifying a difference but also a certain kind of inferiority. French cuisine has never been defined as ethnic. Japanese cuisine is not considered ethnic today. Those are examples of cuisines that are both foreign and prestigious. There is no inferiority associated with them.”
How Americans Pretend to Love Ethnic Food
Response:
While reading Eating The Other this week, the inspiration Tompkins has drawn from the works of Bell Hooks became abundantly clear. Bell hooks writing articulates many of Tompkins key ideas in a manner that is, to some degree, easier to process. In Eating The Other, we see the way the Other is used to represent spice, and potential danger, in the otherwise bland world of whiteness. Characteristics that, in moderation create thrill, and a welcomed sense of wildness into the lives of the white, but in excess veer into the “too-muchness” Tompkins addresses in Chapter 5.
As Bell hooks explores on page 370, encounters with Otherness are coded as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening. The lure then becomes the potential passion and the ability to be “more alive” that the Other supposedly possesses. In this context, the white body is given the chance to be changed by the Other in some way, through sex, food, consumption and advertising.
The commodification of the Other body, allows white people to consume the Other and experience a sense of imagined intimacy while believing they are rebelling against and rejecting white supremacist culture. The primitive fantasies and exotification of the Other body, enforce, as opposed to question white supremacist ideals, in turn, keeping the Other in a position of subordinance and upholding white domination.
Tompkins and Bell Hooks’ acknowledgment of the liberal tendency to look away from racism and the denial that exists in doing so, while we should be examining and recognizing it struck me in its veracity. In a day and age where so many claim to “not see race” and microaggressions and discriminatory jokes so often go unchecked it is essential to- despite initial discomfort- confront racism and understand the ways in which it is so intrinsically tied to upholding of white domination and it’s functioning.