Editors Nieves Pascual Soler and Meredith E. Abarca offer in their collection, Rethinking Chicana/o Literature through Food: Postnational Appetites, a cornucopia of exceptional essays that apply their newly constructed theoretical paradigm based on food and food consciousness in the analysis and hermeneutics of Chicano/a literary production. The authors brilliantly posit that food preparation and consumption extant in literary discourse is a vehicle of communication encoding various acts of rebellion against marginalization and exclusion in a patriarchal nation. Foodways, Soler and Abarca splendidly and provocatively assert, provide a means of 'redefining subjectivities in postnational cultures.' This is a must-read scholarly work for those interested in the construction of national and postnational subjectivities. - Maria Herrera-Sobek, Associate Vice Chancellor, Professor of Chicana/o Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Covering a diverse range of writers and texts, this collection is a valuable contribution to food studies and literary scholarship that has overlooked the presence of food and consumption in Chicana/o writing. Abarca and Pascual Soler provide a much-needed study on how food in Chicana/o literature creates and represents consciousness/concientizacion, thus shifting the Anzalduan border paradigm from an 'open wound' to an 'open mouth.' A study like this was long overdue. - Cristina Herrera, Associate Professor of Chicano and Latin American Studies, California State University, Fresno, USA