Reviewed by:

• Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions by Katherine Keyser
• Kim Adams (bio)

Modernistic Concoctions: Edible Roots of Race Science in American Fiction

Katherine Keyser's Artificial Color begins with F. Scott Fitzgerald's vision of New York City as a sugar sculpture in The Great Gatsby. It ends with a "pyramid" of groceries—ham, steak, lamb, bacon, sausages, and frankfurters piled on top of "a small crate filled with choice fruits and vegetables"—supplied by the Black Banana King of Boston in Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy (168–69). In each image, abundance teeters on the edge of excess. If White privilege is white sugar—a deracinated extract refined from racialized labor to pure saccharine pleasure—then Black wealth is dead meat—a carnivorous capitalism of patriarchal flesh crushing the small vegetable souls of Black women and clogging the arteries of Black men. Keyser's argument is that modern food—and its attendant systems of growing, picking, slaughtering, shipping, selling, cooking, smelling, tasting, eating, and drinking—are shaped by modern science, including the "science" of race. Food, in turn, shapes the racial imaginary of modern American fiction.

Artificial Color relies implicitly upon the argument, established by Ann Douglas and George Hutchinson among others, that the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism ought to be read together.¹ Keyser reads the work of Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West alongside that of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in her analysis of "modern food and racial fictions." The book focuses on novels from the interwar period and US food systems, yet it follows the Lost Generation to Europe and flirts with genre-bending modernist prose. West's 1948 novel and Toomer's 1923 Cane mark the temporal poles of the book, while Schuyler's pulp-sci-fi serial Black Empire and Stein's lyric novel Lucy Church Amiably mark the generic ones, with West functioning as the limit case of late modern realism. For Keyser and her authors, race signifies primarily along a black/white boundary, with Brown bodies serving as the foils against which the modern racial system is built. The "Jewish problem" of European politics of the period is addressed within this American schema, and Orientalism signifies only in passing.

Keyser chose a compelling moment in the history of American eating. The early twentieth century saw the advent of nutrition science in food consumption and industrial science in food production. Vitamins were discovered in these years; canned [End Page 91] food was celebrated for its vitamin content. The Haber-Bosch process fixed nitrogen, birthing the petroleum-based fertilizers of modern agribusiness. Yet the popular imaginary of the period was dominated by the resurgence of "race science" in the form of eugenics.

The most interesting formulation of Keyser's argument suggests a convergence of these three discourses. As she writes in the introduction: "Nutrition science commingled with emergent race theory, sometimes going so far as to propose that food quality could transform racial categorization" (2). Much compelling scholarship has been written recently connecting eugenics and modern literature. Daylanne English's Unnatural Selections, for example, addresses eugenic thought in the same literary circles as Artificial Color.² Concurrently, the work of food studies scholars, such as Kyla Wazana Tompkins and Psyche Williams-Forson, has done much to elucidate the racial imaginaries of American eating.³ At its best, Keyser's book critiques the multiple embodied discourses of racial formation operating simultaneously in a culinary and scientific register in modern US literature.

In this regard, her chapter on George Schuyler is perhaps the most compelling. It brings together theories of hybridization and miscegenation from agricultural science and eugenics, as well as the raw-food diet of the Schuyler family. Josephine Schuyler's dietary advice to the mothers of "Aframerica" informs Keyser's reading of George Schuyler's hybrid heroines, and the science diet of their mixed-race child-prodigy daughter. Eating is aspirational here, as it is for Stein and Hemingway in their fictions of European ethnic belonging. Yet elsewhere in Keyser's book, particularly in her...

审核人：

• 人工色素：凯瑟琳·凯瑟 (Katherine Keyser) 的现代食品与种族小说
• 金·亚当斯（生平）

现代主义混合物：美国小说中种族科学的可食用根源

Katherine Keyser 的Artificial Color始于 F. Scott Fitzgerald 在《了不起的盖茨比》中将纽约市想象成一座糖雕。它以杂货的“金字塔”结束——火腿、牛排、羊肉、培根、香肠和法兰克福香肠堆在“一个装满精选水果和蔬菜的小箱子”的顶部——由多萝西·韦斯特的波士顿黑香蕉王提供生活很容易（168–69）。在每幅图像中，富足都在过剩的边缘摇摇欲坠。如果白人特权是白糖——一种从种族化劳动中提炼成纯粹糖精快乐的脱色提取物——那么黑人财富就是死肉——一种食肉的资本主义，父权制的肉体压碎了黑人女性植物性的小灵魂，堵塞了黑人男性的动脉。Keyser 的论点是，现代食物——以及随之而来的种植、采摘、屠宰、运输、销售、烹饪、嗅觉、品尝、饮食和饮用等系统——是由现代科学塑造的，包括种族“科学”。反过来，食物塑造了现代美国小说的种族想象。

人工色彩隐含地依赖于安道格拉斯和乔治哈钦森等人建立的论点，即哈林文艺复兴和美国现代主义应该一起阅读。¹凯瑟在分析“现代食品和种族小说”时阅读了让·图默、乔治·斯凯勒、佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿和多萝西·韦斯特的作品以及欧内斯特·海明威、格特鲁德·斯坦、F.斯科特和塞尔达·菲茨杰拉德的作品。这本书侧重于两次世界大战期间和美国食品系统的小说，但它跟随迷失的一代来到欧洲，并与流派不同的现代主义散文调情。West 1948 年的小说和 Toomer 1923 年的Cane标志着这本书的时间两极，而 Schuyler 的通俗科幻连续剧Black Empire和 Stein 的抒情小说露西·丘奇 (Lucy Church) 亲切地标记了通用的那些，而韦斯特 (West) 则充当了晚期现代现实主义的极限案例。对于 Keyser 和她的作者来说，种族主要是沿着黑/白边界表示的，棕色的身体作为现代种族体系建立的陪衬。这一时期欧洲政治的“犹太人问题”在这个美国图式中得到了解决，东方主义只是顺带一提。

凯泽选择了美国饮食史上一个引人注目的时刻。二十世纪初，食品消费领域出现了营养科学，食品生产领域出现了工业科学。这些年发现了维生素；罐头[End Page 91]食品因其维生素含量而闻名。Haber-Bosch 工艺固氮，催生了现代农业综合企业的石油基肥料。然而，这一时期流行的想象是由以优生学形式出现的“种族科学”的复兴所主导的。

Keyser 论证中最有趣的表述表明了这三种话语的融合。正如她在引言中所写：“营养科学与新兴种族理论相结合，有时甚至提出食品质量可以改变种族分类”(2)。最近写了许多引人注目的学术研究，将优生学和现代文学联系起来。例如，Daylanne English 的Unnatural Selections解决了与Artificial Color相同的文学圈中的优生学思想。²同时，Kyla Wazana Tompkins 和 Psyche Williams-Forson 等食品研究学者的工作在阐明美国人饮食的种族想象方面做了很多工作。^3个最好的一面是，凯瑟的书批评了现代美国文学中在烹饪和科学领域同时运作的多种具体化的种族形成话语。

在这方面，她关于 George Schuyler 的章节可能是最引人注目的。它汇集了农业科学和优生学的杂交和混血理论，以及 Schuyler 家族的生食饮食。Josephine Schuyler 给“Afr​​america”的母亲们的饮食建议让 Keyser 读到了 George Schuyler 的混血女主角，以及他们的混血神童女儿的科学饮食。在这里，吃是令人向往的，就像斯坦因和海明威在他们关于欧洲民族归属感的小说中那样。然而在 Keyser 书中的其他地方，尤其是她的……