“You are what you eat,” or so goes a well-worn adage. But what if “you” are an 18th-century Brit and “what you eat” is exotic fare from the Orient? The implications are explored by Yin Yuan in Alimentary Orientalism: Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East.
Yin Yuan is not strictly concerned with the “edible” but rather “exotic ingestants”, particularly tea and opium. More specifically, Yin Yuan examines ingestion of such consumables as a symbolic motif in British literature from the 1700s through the 1800s. In this period, new circuits of exchange and imperialist expansion made the literal ingestion of exotic commodities possible, if not ubiquitous. Indeed, what started out as exotic, in the case of tea, was thoroughly domesticated as a part of English national identity over the course of a century. But what makes tea and other alimentary consumables such a rich subject of imagination and analysis is another facet of their material reality. These are things external to the person that are literally incorporated into the person through the act of ingestion.
As the place where self opens up to the outside the mouth marks the site of the most exhilaratingly intimate of cross-cultural encounters.
Across six chronologically organized chapters, Yin Yuan analyzes such cross-cultural encounters as narrated in a raft of literary works, and in the process, she makes two connected arguments. One is that Orientalism is not synonymous with racism, though it became so over time, as “alimentary Orientalism” gave way to a more pernicious, hierarchical, Orientalist discourse grounded in visual difference and tropes of infection. The Opium Wars and the Great Exhibition of 1851 mark the turning point. The second argument is that prior to this racist turn, authors adopted Orientalist motifs in “self reflexive” ways. That is, authors made intentional use of Orientalist symbols to explore ideas about cultural difference and the porous boundaries between self and other, national belonging and global connections. To be sure, the authors Yuan examines represented the Orient as “other”, but they did so knowingly, in purposefully contradictory ways, through characters subject to ridicule, or with explicit attention to the status of the exotic as a figment of imagination. This self-reflexivity has often been missed, Yin Yuan posits, because the racist Orientalism of the mid- to late-19th century has been read back into earlier works.
The analysis is convincing, grounded in close reading and always in dialogue with other scholars, while occasionally jargon-prone and geared toward a niche audience. Most chapters center on two authors, some widely known by non-specialists, others more obscure. The authors are Oliver Goldsmith and William Beckford (chapter two), Thomas Moore and Sir Walter Scott (chapter three), Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb (chapter four), and Charles Dickens paired with Charlotte Brontë (chapter 6). Chapters one and five are more thematically organized around early 18th-century debates about tea and the “paradigm shift in British representations of Chinese otherness”, occasioned by the Opium Wars of the mid-19th-century.
There is little hand-holding along the way in terms of concise synopses of what may be unfamiliar texts, author biographies, or information on the contexts of publishing and readership. There is perhaps too much hand-holding when it comes to information about China as a real political and geographical site, as opposed to a figment of literary imagination. In discussing Charles Lamb, for instance, Yuan points out that
Canton on China’s southeastern coast … is nowhere near the Great Wall, which is situated across China’s historical northern border with Mongolia.
The oddly specific detail is also anachronistic. This is all to say that the intended audience for this book on Orientalism, as might be expected, is one more versed in English literature than Asian histories or cultures.
It is nevertheless a book of definite interest to those who care about Asia and Asian people and who recognize Orientalism, in its pernicious form, as a concern of the present. Yin Yuan’s Afterword explicitly addresses COVID-era representations of the Chinese as depraved consumers of raw bats and the like. But she does so in order to underscore that not all representations of “exotic ingestion” are likewise racist. Instead, exotic ingestion has been “a particularly capacious and multivocal site for cross-cultural imagination” and “holds resources for alternative, more self-reflexive, ways of conceiving otherness.”
The earlier chapters are convincing on that account. But here is the problem, not so much for her argument but for our world. This capacious, self-reflexive, Orientalism is so very literary and subtle, demanding interpretation and critical engagement. In building her sub-arguments, Yin Yuan insists that other scholars of literature have misinterpreted the sources. The specifics of these sub-arguments lie outside the scope of this review. But it requires no feat of interpretation and no critical engagement to be swayed by that other Orientalism, the one that casts the Chinese as depraved eaters of “every scrap of digestible animal matter, earth-worms, sea reptiles of all kinds, mice, and other vermin”, as one Peter Lund Simmonds put in in 1859. And it is this kind of Orientalism that is likely to drum up enthusiasm for war, as it did in the 19th century.
Orientalism, as Edward Said theorized it, is a tool of power, and it’s easy to see how it operates as such in its racist form. But what power resides in the capacious, literary, and subtle forms of Orientalism that Yin Yuan analyzes? Alimentary Orientalism, may “complicate”, “subvert”, “and even transform normative expressions of power”, but whether it thereby constitutes an alternative site of power is unclear.