Andrew Warnes: His new book argues that the great American barbecue smolders on the coals of genocidal racism
All in all, [the barbecue] made for a kick-ass party. But after reading Andrew Warnes' "Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food," I suspect more was going on, beneath the smoke cookery, than I cared to acknowledge.
To this day, writes Warnes, a lecturer in American literature and culture at Leeds University, barbecue "has yet to escape the fraught implications of savagery and cannibalism inbuilt and original to its name." Barbecue's early popularization in 18th century London was "wedded to the ascent of new notions of racial exoticism and mastery." In one of the earliest English-language descriptions of this imported cuisine, Ned Ward's "The Barbacue Feast," published in 1707, "the whipping of slaves goes hand in hand," theorizes Warnes, "with the savage barbecuing of meat. Both belong to the production of a new imperial supremacy that can corrupt those it empowers."
Best of all, or most absurd of all, there is Warnes' rumination on what it must have been like to participate in one of President Andrew Jackson's famous Election Day barbecues:
"And perhaps these mountains of meat in turn connoted a power over violence in a way no other food could. Perhaps prospective politicians kept planning this particular event because, even as it offered opportunities to display public generosity, it declared to all in town that they were men -- warriors even. Slowly rotting in the summer sun, the piles of pig would have announced a kind of power, a mastery over rather than servitude to death. War veterans, after a drink or two, could comment on the meat, contemplating its resemblance to the roasted and dismembered Native corpses they had seen."
"Savage Barbecue" is either the most ridiculous book ever written about America's defining "grass-roots" food, or it is the most profound. Or perhaps it is both. As someone who takes his barbecue very, very seriously, and who is equally unafraid of fire and raw flesh (not to mention writers like Warnes, who tackle their subjects with a clutch of poststructuralist deconstructionists cheering them on and the likes of Edward Said nodding in sage approval), I found myself both riveted and appalled by Warnes' investigation of barbecue. Was I cultivating a heart of darkness in my own backyard? Or did I, like so many Americans, just like to hang outside by the fire and rend some exquisitely prepared meat with my teeth?
The story begins and ends with the name. As legend, and the Oxford English Dictionary, would have it, the word "barbecue" is derived from "barbacoa," a word supposedly used by indigenous Haitians to refer to a "framework of sticks set upon posts" upon which the Native Americans placed their meat, for purposes of slow smoking. Barbecue may have even played a part in the earliest initial encounters between Europe and the New World. Columbus' sailors are reported to have been horrified at the sight of slowly smoked whole iguanas hoisted above the beaches of what later became dubbed Hispaniola.
Etymologically speaking, therefore, it is only a coincidence that "barbecue" shares some syllables with "barbarian" (derived from the Greek word denoting "those who don't speak Greek"). But for Warnes, there are no coincidences. Assonance is no accident! Europeans invested the connotations of barbarism in the indigenous word barbacoa, and, voilà, barbecue came to signify not just smoke cookery but also the savagery of the New World, as opposed to the civilization of the Old....
Read entire article at Andrew Leonard at Salon.com
To this day, writes Warnes, a lecturer in American literature and culture at Leeds University, barbecue "has yet to escape the fraught implications of savagery and cannibalism inbuilt and original to its name." Barbecue's early popularization in 18th century London was "wedded to the ascent of new notions of racial exoticism and mastery." In one of the earliest English-language descriptions of this imported cuisine, Ned Ward's "The Barbacue Feast," published in 1707, "the whipping of slaves goes hand in hand," theorizes Warnes, "with the savage barbecuing of meat. Both belong to the production of a new imperial supremacy that can corrupt those it empowers."
Best of all, or most absurd of all, there is Warnes' rumination on what it must have been like to participate in one of President Andrew Jackson's famous Election Day barbecues:
"And perhaps these mountains of meat in turn connoted a power over violence in a way no other food could. Perhaps prospective politicians kept planning this particular event because, even as it offered opportunities to display public generosity, it declared to all in town that they were men -- warriors even. Slowly rotting in the summer sun, the piles of pig would have announced a kind of power, a mastery over rather than servitude to death. War veterans, after a drink or two, could comment on the meat, contemplating its resemblance to the roasted and dismembered Native corpses they had seen."
"Savage Barbecue" is either the most ridiculous book ever written about America's defining "grass-roots" food, or it is the most profound. Or perhaps it is both. As someone who takes his barbecue very, very seriously, and who is equally unafraid of fire and raw flesh (not to mention writers like Warnes, who tackle their subjects with a clutch of poststructuralist deconstructionists cheering them on and the likes of Edward Said nodding in sage approval), I found myself both riveted and appalled by Warnes' investigation of barbecue. Was I cultivating a heart of darkness in my own backyard? Or did I, like so many Americans, just like to hang outside by the fire and rend some exquisitely prepared meat with my teeth?
The story begins and ends with the name. As legend, and the Oxford English Dictionary, would have it, the word "barbecue" is derived from "barbacoa," a word supposedly used by indigenous Haitians to refer to a "framework of sticks set upon posts" upon which the Native Americans placed their meat, for purposes of slow smoking. Barbecue may have even played a part in the earliest initial encounters between Europe and the New World. Columbus' sailors are reported to have been horrified at the sight of slowly smoked whole iguanas hoisted above the beaches of what later became dubbed Hispaniola.
Etymologically speaking, therefore, it is only a coincidence that "barbecue" shares some syllables with "barbarian" (derived from the Greek word denoting "those who don't speak Greek"). But for Warnes, there are no coincidences. Assonance is no accident! Europeans invested the connotations of barbarism in the indigenous word barbacoa, and, voilà, barbecue came to signify not just smoke cookery but also the savagery of the New World, as opposed to the civilization of the Old....