(In)digestion in Literature and Film

Niki Kiviat is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies at Columbia University, where her research interests include food studies; Italy’s food and material culture as manifest in films of the Economic Miracle; star studies; and the legacy of neorealist film, which was the subject of her Master’s thesis, also from Columbia. Her essay, "From Pizzaiola to Phenom: Viewing Sophia Loren Through Food," will be published in the edited volume Eve’s Sinful Bite: Foodscapes in Italian Women’s Writing, Culture, and Society (forthcoming, Bloomsbury). Serena J. Rivera is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh where she teaches the language, literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world. Her research interests concern the intersections of food, gender, race, and sexuality throughout Luso/Hispanophone cultural production. She has published on the topics of food metaphors in Mozambican and Cape Verdean literatures as well as the teaching of Portuguese language in the US. She has also translated Alberto Pena-Rodriguez’s News on the American Dream: A History of the Portuguese Press in the United States (forthcoming, Tagus Press). She is currently working on several article manuscripts that explore the use of food in (post)colonial nationalist rhetoric in Mozambique as well as the linkages between the abject and racial identity in late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century Brazilian literature. Her monograph project comparatively examines the intersections of masculinity, food, and nation in Brazilian, Cape Verdean and Mozambican literatures.

Introduction

Section One: Theoretical and Formal Contours






Suckling Pig or Potatoes? Class Politics and Food Symbolism in
Eastern European Film

Elena Popan




Haptic for Gourmets: Cinema, Gastronomy, and Strategic Exoticism
in Eat Drink Man Woman and Tortilla Soup

Aida Roldán-García




Pro-Ana and Mia Blogs and Care of the Self
Jenny Platz

Section Two: Disordered Eating Beyond the West




White Pigs and Black Pigs, Wild Boar and Monkey Meat: Cannibalism and
War Victimhood in Japanese Cinema

Kenta McGrath




"Such a Thin Slice of Watermelon!" Fat and Thin in Macabéa’s
Malnourished World

Benjamin Legg




Multiplicities of Identities and Meanings Behind Devouring Characters in
Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away

Katsuya Izumi




The Dangerous Vegan: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and the Anti-Feminist
Rhetoric of Disordered Eating

Laura Wright

Section Three: Disordered Eating in the West




Dietary Perversions and Subversion of Nature in Huysmans’s
Against Nature

Romain Peter




Eating the Dead: Transgressive Hungers and the Grotesque
Body in Ulysses

Wilson Taylor




Hungry for Honey: Desire in Dacia Maraini’s Il treno per Helsinki
Eilis Kierans




"Identica a loro?": (In)digesting Food and Identity in Igiaba
Scego’s "Salsicce"

Francesca Calamita




From Bartholomew Fair to Bridesmaids: Ben Jonson’s Fecopoetics

and Gendered American Pop Culture

Emily Gruber Keck