Are We What We Eat? Food and Identity in Late Twentieth-Century ...

To analyze the significance of food preparation and food consumption in the process of identity formation, I consider eight works of ethnic American fiction and autobiography¹⁷ written during the last three decades of the twentieth century,¹⁸ a time when many Americans publicly began to celebrate or at least acknowledge their racial and ethnic identities. According to Matthew Frye Jacobson, an important catalyst for this racial and ethnic awakening was the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and its resulting legislation, which not only granted legal protection and political rights to racial and ethnic minorities but also led many assimilated white Americans to re/discover and publicly validate their ethnic roots: “[T]he sudden centrality of black grievance to the national discussion prompted a rapid move among white ethnics to dissociate themselves from monolithic white privilege [through, for example,] [t]he popular rediscovery of immigrant grandparents” (180). Although white Americans, such as the narrator of Black Dog of Fate, could choose to embrace their ethnicity as a way of seeking “refuge from the banalities of mass society in the philosophical premodern commune of ethnic particularism” (Jacobson 80), people of color, such as the narrator of Catfish and Mandala, had no choice but to confront their Other status in the dominant American culture. Unlike many white ethnics who could pass as members of the dominant WASP culture without question, people of color possessed descent qualities that rendered assimilation or passing nearly impossible. Despite this important difference, during and after the Civil Rights Movement, more and more Americans have publicly and openly embraced and celebrated their racial and ethnic identities and in so doing have worked toward the destabilization of reductive definitions of “Americanness” and ethnic Otherness.

Post–Civil Rights America saw the expansion of the outdated and exclusionary category of “Americanness,” and it also saw the subversion of essentialist definitions of masculinity and femininity. Just as the Civil Rights Movement put an end to legalized racism, the Women’s Rights Movement—a result of the Civil Rights Movement¹⁹—worked to end institutionalized sexism and gender-based discrimination. As a result, women had more opportunities to gain employment outside of