University of Texas Press
Culinary Palettes
Über dieses Buch
2025 Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication Award, SECAC (formerly the Southeastern College Art Conference)
How the visual culture of food, cookery, and consumption played a central role in the making of postrevolutionary Mexico.
Postrevolutionary Mexico City was a site of anxious nation-building, as rampant modernization converged and clashed with the nation’s growing nostalgia for its pre-Columbian heritage. During this volatile period, food became a meaningful symbol for a Mexican citizenry seeking new modes of national participation.
Culinary Palettes explores how the artistic invocation of food cultures became an arena in which to negotiate the political entanglements of postrevolutionary Mexico. Lesley Wolff casts a nuanced eye on the work of visual artists such as Tina Modotti, Carlos González, and Rufino Tamayo, who nurtured the symbolic and performative power of iconic foods such as pulque, mole poblano, and watermelon. Through analysis of a wide array of visual evidence, including paintings, architecture, vintage postcards, menus, and cookbooks, Culinary Palettes demonstrates how these artists positioned their work within a broad visual landscape that relied upon the power of Mexican foodways in the urban and national imagination. In the studios of modernists, Wolff argues, artistic production, foodways, and Indigeneity proved to be mutually constitutive—and at times weaponized—agents in articulating competing claims to a new nationhood.
Information zu Autoren / Herausgebern
Lesley A. Wolff is an assistant professor of art and design at the University of Tampa. She is coeditor of the volume Nourish and Resist: Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art.
Rezensionen
Wolff’s novel take on Mexican cuisine and art history displays how food is deeply rooted within broader cultural and social themes for artists, viewers, diners, and all who maintain an interest, love and fascination for Mexican cuisine and art. The book is a must-read for current scholars of this twentieth-century Mexican history, those interested in the role of food in cementing and capturing broader social trends across Mexico and beyond, and especially for anyone intrigued by the scholarly use of visual cues, notions, and links between what we know about the world around us, and how it is reflected in what we view, experience, and eat.
— H-Net[Culinary Palettes] offers the reader a richly seasoned visual feast…This meticulously researched study creatively blends art history, culinary and food history, political history, visual studies, and cultural studies with postcolonial theory.
— CHOICEIn calling attention to some of the mutually reinforcing qualities of visual culture and foodways, as well as the utility of their sociopolitical union in consumer culture and an increasingly international art market, Culinary Palettes helps to forge exciting new paths for art historical inquiry across the Americas and beyond...With Wolff’s excellent scholarly contribution, we are invited to recognize the tensions, anxieties, visualities, and ultimately the systems of power that gird Mexican foodways as well as related representational and daily social practices.
— caa.reviewsFachgebiete
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Frontmatter
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Contents
vii -
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List of Illustrations
ix -
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Prologue
xiii -
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Introduction. Entremeses
1 -
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Chapter 1. Bebidas
27 -
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Chapter 2. Guisos
63 -
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Chapter 3. Frutas
105 -
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Conclusion. Bocadillos
151 -
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Appendix. Recipes for Mole Poblano or Mole de Guajolote
163 -
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Acknowledgments
187 -
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Notes
191 -
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Bibliography
203 -
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Index
217
