ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on corporeal metaphors of multilingualism that question organic wholeness and stability, inner homogeneity and policed borders. Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque body of carnival (1984) can be interpreted as an insurgent metaphor of a possible social and linguistic community. It highlights heterogeneity, inner tensions and open, porous borders and articulates a vision of social change through a subversion of existing power structures. The chapter also explores the transcultural and transhistorical use of culinary metaphors and the metaphors of devoration and digestion: Macaronic poetry, the multimodal genre of the Ensalada, the notion of massalification, Gómez-Peña’s “menudo chowder”, the complementary Trinidadian narratives of the tossed salad and the callaloo, as well as Brazilian anthropophagy.
