ABSTRACT
As a contribution to an inquiry into China’s modern sensory culture, this chapter explores memories of food in Chinese- and Western-language autobiographical accounts of the Cultural Revolution, incorporating into the sample “revolutionary” cookbooks that are distinctly associated with China’s Cultural Revolution heritage and thus feed into nostalgia for that decade. Sensory pleasures in the form of visuals, memory of past, and heralds of future experiences of a meal, taste, and smell as evoked through text and images may be related to the past experiences of their authors. Considering both autobiographical texts and cookbooks as (literary) narratives in their own right, I argue that food narratives serve particular discursive functions in the (self-)stylization of their authors, in the reflection of past events and in the perpetuation or rewriting of certain images of China and its Cultural Revolution. This approach thus, firstly, elucidates certain aspects of the historical epoch of the Cultural Revolution and of the policies of its remembrance. Secondly, this serves to underline the (often subtle) power of food narratives and of the sensory sensations it (re)produces or reflects upon.
