ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes a wide range of approaches and methodologies drawn from food, postcolonial, historical, gender, literary, and cultural studies, with a central focus on the dynamic interplay between Caribbean food and writing. It focuses on literary texts, but also includes historical accounts, journals, memoirs, testimonies, essays, and other writings which illuminate the relationship between Caribbean food and Caribbean literature. Placing literary texts in dialogue with these other writings demonstrates their crucial connectedness to a wider oral culture and popular traditions in the Caribbean, something which is often overlooked in Western accounts of food and literature. The chapter addresses the lacunae by proposing that we read the relationship between food and literature in the Anglophone Caribbean as part of a "call and response between food and culture. The Caribbean's first cooks were Amerindians who settled in the region long before the advent of Europeans or enslaved Africans.
