Agrarian Pasts, Utopian Futures : : Food, Nostalgia, and the Power of Dreaming in Old Comedy and the New Southern Food Movement (original) (raw)

2014

Abstract

Author(s): Kelting, Lily | Abstract: This dissertation attempts to answer one very large question: in what political ways do the aesthetics of food function? Throughout this dissertation, I articulate moments in food culture when nostalgia (looking backwards to foods of the past) in fact becomes an idealized model for a utopian future. This conflation of looking backward (nostalgia) and looking forward (utopianism) demonstrates the ways in which time is multiple and multi-directional. In my current work, I address the relationship between nostalgia and utopian thinking in two case studies: the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes and cookbooks from the contemporary American South. In these two examples, nostalgia for food is entangled with utopian rhetoric, and moving back towards an agricultural, pre-democratic government is figured as a utopian turn. This nostalgia often operates as a revisionist history that erases slave labor and scarcity. However, what I call "the utopia...

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