In Artificial Color, Catherine Keyser has produced a book that will quickly become a pivotal text in critical eating studies. It makes clear how an understanding of the alimentary intimacies in writings by Fitzgerald, Toomer, Schuyler, Stein, Hurston, West, and Hemingway oblige us to think about food's racial embodiment. With its elegant readings of modern US narrative literature on both sides of the color line, Keyser asks us to think about how food can be
an imaginative vehicle for racial transformations. This isn't simply a book about eating but about how a practice of reading that centers food can go a long way in talking about mutability of the body in its gendered and racialized forms.
Catherine Keyser is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and the author of Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture (Rutgers University Press 2010).