The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction and Homegrown Caribbean Feminism(s)

The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction andHomegrown Caribbean Feminism(s) is a comparative study of foodimagery in contemporary fiction by Guadeloupeans Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau, Haitian Edwidge Danticat, and Trinidadians Lakshmi Persaud and Shani Mootoo. RobynCope's key contention is that the past quarter century of Caribbean culinaryfiction engenders the Caribbean freedom struggle in two senses of the word: first, by imbuing the history of that struggle with gender sensitivity andspecificity; second, by dreaming up a new kind of creative, coalitionalCaribbean freedom struggle.

Cope reads food imagery in Caribbean women'swriting not only for what it can teach us about the colonizer-colonized binary, but also in order to gain insight into power dynamics within the Caribbeanitself - between generations, ethnic and racial groups, religious and politicalaffiliations, social classes and sexual identities, and most especially betweenwomen.Cope's approach, part of theexciting new field of literary food studies, aims to recover stories thatcannot be told without food. By reading these works with and against one another, Cope honours the great geographic, linguistic, ethnic, racial, political andsocial diversity of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean women'sexperiences with oppression and resistance. At the same time, her readingteases out Caribbean women's common longing for affirming coalition, symbolizedby commensality, that liberates without collapsing difference. In The Pen and the Pan, the sharedmeal and the shared struggle go hand in hand.