The collection’s final section, “Imagination and Exchange,” focuses on

food as a site of performative hospitalities. For Carrie Helms Tippen, in

“‘A New Confederacy’: The Economy of Southern Hospitality in William
Faulkner’s Sanctuary,” one of William Faulkner’s least studied novels provides
a powerful critique of Southern hospitality. Hospitality, she shows,
functioned in the South as an informal exchange economy, a system later
employed to market the South to tourists. The images of gracious hosts
setting out bountiful tables for their guests were particularly effective
tools for encouraging national reunification after the Civil War. Despite
these promises, she argues, Sanctuary shows that the “unequal exchanges”
necessitated by hospitality are “neither a stable structure on which to
build a social order, nor a gallant system on which to build a proud regional
identity” and that “many presumed ‘sanctuaries’ hardly deserve the
designation.” Adam Fajardo explores another sort of “sanctuary” in “Here
There Will Be No Unhappiness: Chocolate and Langston Hughes’s Utopian
Impulse,” albeit one that veers into “impossible” social relations. Fajardo
argues that Hughes engaged with a little-studied utopian discourse that
fermented around the early-twentieth-century chocolate industry. Using
chocolate as a racial metaphor, Hughes mounts a challenge to the primitivist
theories of race that dominated the modernist era.
The diversity of texts, concerns, and methodologies collected in
Modernism and Food Studies attests to the generative power of combining
these two vibrant disciplines. The organizing logic of the chapters,
broadly speaking, moves from early in the period (Wilde, Huysmans) to
late (Tarashankar, Hughes) and from the particular (the body, cookbooks)
to the abstract (utopian impulses and dreams deferred). But we also invite
the reader to move through the collection as one might at a buffet,
sampling here and there, experiencing the novel combinations that would
have been lost had these essays been published individually. For if there is
anything we have learned from creating a shared space for new modernist
studies and food studies to mingle, it is that much can be gained from
unexpected encounters.