Violent Appetites
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
Hunger in the Early Northeast
Carla Cevasco
View Inside
Format: HC - Paper over BoardPrice: $50.00
How hunger shaped both colonialism and Native resistance in Early America
“In this bold and original study, Cevasco punctures the myth of colonial America as a land of plenty. This is a book about the past with lessons for our time of food insecurity.”—Peter C. Mancall, author of The Trials of Thomas Morton
Carla Cevasco reveals the disgusting, violent history of hunger in the context of the colonial invasion of early northeastern North America. Locked in constant violence throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Native Americans and English and French colonists faced the pain of hunger, the fear of encounters with taboo foods, and the struggle for resources. Their mealtime encounters with rotten meat, foraged plants, and even human flesh would transform the meanings of hunger across cultures. By foregrounding hunger and its effects in the early American world, Cevasco emphasizes the fragility of the colonial project, and the strategies of resilience that Native peoples used to endure both scarcity and the colonial invasion. In doing so, the book proposes an interdisciplinary framework for studying scarcity, expanding the field of food studies beyond simply the study of plenty.
Carla Cevasco is assistant professor of American Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She lives in Somerset, NJ.
Publication Date: April 26, 2022
1 b/w illus.
