Fat, desire and disgust in the colonial imagination

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 73, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 211-239

  Forth, Christopher E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; COSMETIC INDUSTRY; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNIC AND RACIAL GROUPS; ETHNOLOGY; HISTORY; HISTORY OF MEDICINE; HUMAN; LEGAL ASPECT; OBESITY; PHYSIOLOGY; POLITICAL SYSTEM; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY; SYMBOLISM; TRAVEL; WEIGHT REDUCTION;

ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL; BEAUTY CULTURE; COLONIALISM; ETHNOLOGY; HISTORY OF MEDICINE; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HUMANS; OVERWEIGHT; POPULATION GROUPS; PREJUDICE; SYMBOLISM; TRAVEL; WEIGHT LOSS;

EID: 84859300869     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: 14774569     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbr016     Document Type: Article

References (120)

1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York, 1978.
2. Such contrasts also throw into relief the physically appealing white couple at the centre of the film: the dandified criminal Pépé (played by rugged leading man Jean Gabin), whose flight from the French police led him to seek refuge in Algiers, and the slender Parisienne Gaby Gould (Mireille Balin), who represents all that Pépé had left behind.
3. For critical discussions of this film see David Henry Slavin, Colonial Cinema and Imperial France, 1919-1939: White Blind Spots, Male Fantasies, Settler Myths, Baltimore, 2001, pp. 173-84.
4. Ginette Vincendeau, Pépé le Moko, London, 1998, pp. 13-4.
5. On Algeria see Claude-Antoine Rozet, Voyage dans la régence d'Alger: ou, Description du pays occupé par l'armée française, Arthus Bertrand, Paris, 1833, vol. 2, p. 26.
6. Camille Leynadier and M. Clausel, Histoire de l'Algérie française, H. Morel, Paris, 1848, vol. 3, p. 148.
7. Edouard Adolphe Duchesne, De la prostitution dans la ville d'Alger depuis la conquête, J.-B. Bailliè re, Paris, 1853, pp. 112-4.
8. Octave Houdas, Ethnographie de l'Algérie, Maisonneuve frères et Ch. Leclerc, Paris, 1886, p. 36.
9. Mary Lynn Stewart, For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s-1930s, Baltimore MD, 2001.
10. Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture, New York, 2011
11. Peter N. Stearns, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West, New York, 1997.
12. Sander Gilman, Fat Boys: a Thin Book, Lincoln NE, 2004
13. Georges Vigarello, Les métamorphoses du gras: histoire de l'obésité, Paris, 2010
14. Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, New York, 1999
15. Emily Gowers, The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature, Oxford, 1996
16. Andrew Dalby, Empire of Pleasures: Luxuries and Indulgence in the Roman World, New York, 2000
17. Prospero Alpini, De medicina Aegyptiorum, Francesco de Franceschi, Venice, 1591, Book III, chap. 15.
18. Alpini, La Médecine des Egyptiens (1581-84), transl. R. de Fenoy, Institut français d'archéologie orientale, Cairo, 1980, pp. 294-304 (quotes on pp. 294-5).
19. See also Vigarello, Les métamorphoses, p. 116.
20. One of the 'learned and scientific men' who accompanied Napoleon on campaign in Egypt also regretted that 'excessive corpulency is here esteemed a beauty': Citizen Carrie, 'On the Topography of Manouf, in the Delta', in Memoirs Relative to Egypt, written in that country during the Campaigns of General Bonaparte, R. Phillips, London, 1800, p. 133.
21. On the role of grease in the nineteenth-century racial imagination, see John L. and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 2: the Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Chicago, 1997.
22. On the troubled relationship between the body and 'civilization' see Christopher E. Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body, Basingstoke, 2008.
23. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley, 2002.
24. Philip Robinson, 'Some Beasts of Reproach', Belgravia: an Illustrated London Magazine, December 1883, p. 199.
25. Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of the Enlightenment, Chicago, 2007, p. 171.
26. Vigarello, Les métamorphoses, pp. 114-6.
27. Early tropical medicine focused on sailors and the problems of life at sea rather than on land: David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, Berkeley, 1993, p. 24.
28. John Arbuthnot, An Essay concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies, J. Tonson, London, 1733, p. 155.
29. J. Aegidius van Egmond van der Nijenburg and Johannes Heyman, Travels through Part of Europe, Asia Minor, the Islands of the Archipelago, L. Davis and C. Reymers, London, 1759, vol. 1, p. 285.
30. Constantin-François Volney, Travels through Syria and Egypt in the Years 1783, 1784, and 1785, G.G.J. and J. Robinson, London, 1788, vol. 1, p. 361.
31. Louis de Ché nier, Recherches historiques sur les Maures, et histoire de l'Empire de Maroc, chez l'auteur, Paris, 1788, vol. 3, p. 127.
32. Vigarello, Les métamorphoses, pp. 143-4.
33. 'Are we a good-looking people?', Putnam's Monthly: a Magazine of Literature, Science and Art 1: 3, March 1853, p. 312.
34. This concern emerged out of travel reports and became part of British lore about migration to Africa or India.
35. See, for instance, Macgregor Laird and N.A.K. Oldfield, Narrative of an Expedition into the Interior of Africa, Richard Bentley, London, 1837, vol. 1, p. 73.
36. William Holt Yates, The Modern History and Condition of Egypt, its Climate, Diseases, and Capabilities, Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1843, p. 313.
37. Hydaspes, The Truth about the Indian army and its Officers, Simpkin, Marshall and Co., London, 1861, p. 42.
38. Arnold, Colonizing the Body.
39. Eric T. Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas, Durham NC, 2006.
40. Joyce L. Huff, 'Freaklore: the Dissemination, Fragmentation, and Reinvention of the Legend of Daniel Lambert, King of Fat Men', in Victorian Freaks: the Social Context of Freakery in Britain, ed. Marlene Tromp, Columbus, 2008.
41. Meegan Kennedy, ' "Poor Hoo Loo": Sentiment, Stoicism, and the Grotesque in British Imperial Medicine', in Victorian Freaks, ed. Tromp.
42. Ben Wilson, The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain, 1789-1837, London, 2007, pp. 25-6.
43. Vigarello, Les métamorphoses, pp. 138-52.
44. On nineteenth-century preoccupations with female slenderness see Anna Krugovoy Silver, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 25-49.
45. Vigarello, Les métamorphoses, pp. 171-91.
46. Mungo Park, Travels to the Interior Districts of Africa, James Humphreys, London, 1800, p. 181.
47. Jean-Baptiste-Léonard Durand, Voyage au Sénégal fait dans les années 1785 et 1786, Dentu, Paris, 1807, p. 89.
48. René Caillié, Journal d'un voyage à Temboctou et à Jenné, dans l'Afrique centrale, Imprimerie royale, Paris, 1830, vol. 1, pp. 99-100.
49. Writing of the long history of such practices as well as her own ethnographic experiences, Rebecca Popenoe states that 'the beatings, pinches, and pain that accompany fattening in Caillié 's description are still very much part of the practice I witnessed': Popenoe, Feeding Desire: Fatness, Beauty, and Sexuality among a Saharan People, New York, 2004, p. 36.
50. Richard S. Fisher, The Book of the World: Being an Account of All Republics, Empires, Kingdoms, and Nations, 2nd edn, J.H. Colton, New York, 1851, vol. 2, p. 629.
51. Thomas L. Nichols, Woman, of All Ages and Nations, Fowlers and Wells, New York, 1849, p. 16.
52. Christian Frederick Damberger [Zacharias Taurinius], Travels through the Interior of Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope to Morocco, Samuel Etheridge, Charlestown, 1801, p. 53n.
53. The 'discovery' of Hottentot fat seems to have been a late eighteenth-century development. Describing them in 1707 as 'the most Lazy and Ignorant part of Mankind', John Maxwell observed their stature as being 'universally of a middle Size.
54. They are clean-limb'd, well proportion'd, and very nimble. I never saw a Fat Person among them'. Maxwell, 'An account of the Cape of Good Hope', Philosophical Transactions 310, April-June 1707, 2, pp. 424-5.
55. Decades later the German explorer Peter Kolb wrote about how the Hottentots smeared their bodies with fat, butter and soot, but he too said nothing about corpulence: Kolb, The Present State of the Cape of Good-Hope, transl. Guido Medley, W. Innys, London, 1731, pp. 49-50.
56. Sir John Barrow, An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa in the Years 1797 and 1798, A. Strahan, London, 1801, p. 281.
57. William Allen and T. R. H. Thomson, A Narrative of the Expedition sent by Her Majesty's Government to the River Niger in 1841, Richard Bentley, London, 1848, p. 238.
58. John Sterling Kingsley, The Standard Natural History, vol. 6: The Natural History of Man, S.S. Cassino, Boston, 1885, p. 279.
59. Plato, The Laws, transl. Thomas L. Pangle, New York, 1980, pp. 196-7.
60. Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, transl. Richard M. Gummere, Cambridge MA, 1979, pp. 412-3.
61. Charles John Andersson, Lake Ngami
62. Explorations and Discoveries during Four Years' Wanderings in the Wilds of South Western Africa, Hurst and Blackett, London, 1857, pp. 146-7.
63. On the appearance of fat African kings in fiction, see Anne McClintock's discussion of King Twala in Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York, 1995, p. 245.
64. For instance, see Rev. Dr Johann Ludwig Krapf, 'East-Africa Mission', Church Missionary Record 17: 1-9, January 1846, p. 6.
65. On the ancient sources of the 'belly-slave' image see Karl Olav Sandnes, Belly and Body in the Pauline Epistles, Cambridge, 2002
66. John Carne, Lives of Eminent Missionaries, Fisher, Son and Co., London, 1833, vol. 2, p. 122.
67. Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, The Mystery of Suffering, W. Skeffington and Son, London, 1877, p. 50.
68. Rousselot de Surgy, Mélanges intéressans et curieux, Lacombe, Paris, 1766, vol. 4, p. 190.
69. Jean-Baptiste de Boyer Argens, Lettres chinoises, ou, Correspondance philosophique, historique et critique, Pierre Paupie, Paris, 1755, vol. 1, p. 33.
70. Gilman, Fat Boys, p. 47.
71. Heather Streets, Martial Races: the Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914, Manchester, 2004, pp. 94-5, 156-85.
72. See also Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: the 'Manly Englishman' and the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester, 1995
73. James Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions, 2nd edn, T. and J. Underwood, London, 1818, pp. 391-2.
74. Alexander Burnes, 'Lieutenant Burnes on Sinde', Calcutta Monthly Journal. Asiatic News, 3rd series, 2, 1836, pp. 164-7, on p. 166.
75. Sir Monier Monier-Williams, Modern India and the Indians, 5th edn, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trü bner and Co., London, 1891, p. 60.
76. Joshua Duke, How to get Thin; or Banting in India, 2nd edn, Thacker, Spink and Co., Calcutta, 1870, pp. 7-8, 32.
77. Benjamin Moore Norman, Rambles by Land and Water, or Notes of Travel in Cuba and Mexico, Paine and Burgess, New York, 1845, p. 157. Such observations allowed Norman to draw broad generalizations connecting Asian traditions to those he encountered in the Americas.
78. 'If Ganesha stood he would be the very image of many fat, rupee-worshipping Baniyas [members of the merchant and money-lending Baniya caste], to be seen all over India': John Lockwood Kipling, Beast and Man in India: a Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in their Relations with the People, Macmillan and Co., London, 1891, p. 234.
79. William Wadd, Cursory Remarks on Corpulence; or Obesity Considered as a Disease, 3rd edn, J. Callow, London, 1816, pp. 45, 56.
80. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather, pp. 71-3.
81. See, for instance, Sander Gilman, 'Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature', Critical Inquiry 12, 1985
82. Anne Fausto-Sterling, 'Gender, Race, and Nation: the Comparative Anatomy of "Hottentot" Women in Europe, 1815-1817', in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, ed. Jacqueline Urla and Jennifer Terry, Bloomington, 1995.
83. In 1813 Leigh Hunt was imprisoned for calling the Prince Regent 'a fat Adonis of fifty'. Clifton C. Crais and Pamela Scully, Sarah Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, Princeton, 2008, p. 93.
84. [Anonymous], The Art of Beauty, or, The Best Methods of Improving and Preserving the Shape, Carriage, and Complexion, Knight and Lacey, London, 1825, p. 78.
85. The second and expanded edition of Wadd's book, published thirteen years later, also suggested that perceptions of British fat were being informed by travel reports. A reprinted letter from 'a facetious medical friend' informed Wadd that 'We have some jolly dames in this neighbourhood, tolerable specimens of what you call "obesity," but none of the dimensions of [Mungo] Park's African princesses, where no beauty aspires to royal observation without having first weighed down a moderate-sized camel': Wadd, Comments on Corpulency, John Ebers and Co., London, 1829, p. 56.
86. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût, ou méditations de gastronomie transcendante (1825), Charpentier, Paris, 1845. Subsequent references to this text are given in parentheses.
87. 'The Physician. - No. XII. On Corpulence', New Monthly Magazine 10, 1824, p. 181.
88. Mme É lisabeth Celnart, Manuel des dames, ou L'art de l'élégance, 2nd edn, Librairie Encyclopédique de Roret, Paris, 1833, p. 125.
89. Anna Kingsford, Health, Beauty, and the Toilet. Letters to Ladies from a Lady Doctor, Frederick Warne and Co., London, 1886, p. 9.
90. A century earlier de Chénier had made a similar observation about the Moors in his Recherches historiques, p. 127.
91. Adè le Hommaire de Hell, 'Les Arméniennes à Constantinople', La Revue de l'Orient: Bulletin de la Société Orientale 7, 1845, p. 138.
92. Paul Belouino, La femme: physiologie, histoire, morale (1845), 2nd edn, Perisse Frè res, Paris, 1853, p. 217.
93. Antoine-François-Fé lix Roselly de Lorgues, La croix dans les deux mondes, ou la clef de la connaissance, 4th edn, L.-F. Hivert, Paris, 1847, pp. 94-5
94. See 'A short chapter on bustles', Irish Penny Journal 1: 18, 31 Oct. 1840, pp. 140-1.
95. George Augustus Sala, 'Lady Chesterfield's Letters to her Daughter', The Welcome Guest: a Magazine of Recreative Reading for All 1: 7, 1860, p. 134.
96. Erin O'Connor, Raw Materials: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture, Durham NC, 2000, pp. 153-4.
97. Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture, Berkeley, 2010
98. Paul Broca, Instructions générales pour les recherches anthropologiques, 2nd edn, Masson, Paris, 1879, p. 271.
99. Vigarello, Les métamorphoses, pp. 185-8.
100. Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, La prostitution dans la ville de Paris (1836), J.-B. Baillière et fils, Paris, 1857, vol. 1, pp. 186-7.
101. Gilman, 'Black Bodies', p. 223.
102. 'Review of New Publications', The Gentleman's Magazine 100, August 1830, p. 143.
103. 'A Foreign Officer in the British Service' [André Vieusseux], Italy, and the Italians in the Nineteenth Century, Pewtress, Low and Pewtress, London, 1821, p. 38.
104. Henry T. Finck, Primitive Love and Love-Stories, New York, 1899. Subsequent references to this text are given in parentheses.
105. Gilman, 'Black Bodies', p. 223.
106. Quoted in Vernon A. Rosario, The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity, Oxford, 1997, p. 126.
107. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Selection in Man, F.A. Davis Company, Philadelphia, 1920, p. 166.
108. Ella Adelia Fletcher, The Woman Beautiful, New York, 1901, p. 28.
109. This claim was made decades earlier by George French Angas, Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, 2nd edn, Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1847, vol. 1, p. 73.
110. Henry T. Finck, Girth Control: For Womanly Beauty, Manly Strength, Health, and a Long Life for Everybody, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1923, pp. 2-4.
111. Florence Courtenay, Physical Beauty: How to Develop and Preserve It, Social Culture Publications, New York, 1922, p. 5.
112. Joyce L. Huff, 'A "Horror of Corpulence": Bantingism and Nineteenth-Century Fatphobia', in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco, Berkeley, 2001, p. 50.
113. Allyre Chassevant, Précis de chimie physiologique, Alcan, Paris, 1905, p. 394.
114. Margaret Beck, 'Female Figurines in the European Upper Paleolithic: Politics and Bias in Archaeological Interpretation', in Reading the Body: Representations and Remains in the Archaeological Record, ed. Alison E. Rautman, Philadelphia, 2000, pp. 202-5.
115. Andrea Elizabeth Shaw, The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women's Unruly Political Bodies, Lanham MD, 2006, pp. 10-11.
116. Randall White, 'The Women of Brassempouy: a Century of Research and Interpretation', Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 13: 4, Dec. 2006, pp. 262-3 and pp. 277-8.
117. K. Anne Pyburn, 'Introduction: Rethinking Complex Society', in Ungendering Civilization, ed. K. Anne Pyburn, New York, 2004, p. 25.
118. Francis Heckel, Maigrir: pourquoi? comment?, Paris, 1930, p. 178.
119. Farrell, Fat Shame, pp. 59-81.
120. Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to your Health, New York, 2004, p. 67.