« Eating settlements (I): Edith Snook, ‘The Recipes of Jonathan Odell and 18th-Century Settler Colonialism in the Maritimes’ Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region, 49, 2, 2020, pp. 119-132
The rhetoric is settler colonial: Michael Lechuga, ‘An anticolonial future: reassembling the way we do rhetoric’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 17, 4, 2020, pp. 378-385 »

Eating settlements (II): María Elena García, ‘Devouring the nation: gastronomy and the settler-colonial sublime in Peru’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2020

08Dec20

Abstract: This article explores chef Virgilio Martínez’s culinary exploration of Peruvian biodiversity and his claims of ‘discovering,’ selecting, classifying, and transforming local, ‘unknown,’ Indigenous ingredients and knowledge into high-end global cuisine. Taking Martínez seriously as an artist and cultural agent, I suggest that his work can be understood as a form of what I call the settler-colonial sublime, art that conceals and obscures the erasure and appropriation of specific Indigenous peoples and practices. As with all hegemonic projects, there is room for counter-narratives, and I consider the possibility for the emergence of other-than-colonial relations. Nevertheless, reading Martínez’s culinary artistry alongside the provocative performance art of Elizabeth Lino in Cerro de Pasco helps reveal how the skill and artistry of Peruvian chefs like Martínez work in tandem with a ‘gastropolitical complex’ of political, cultural, and economic forces to obscure ongoing entanglements with coloniality.


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