The Sweetness of Race: On Synesthesia, Addiction, and Self-Possessed Personhood in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth

• Sunhay You ^[1]
  1. [1] Rhode Island School of Design
• Localización: American literature: A journal of literary history, criticism and bibliography, ISSN 0002-9831, ISSN-e 1527-2117, Vol. 95, Nº 3, 2023 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Senses with/out Subjects), págs. 513-537
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • “The Sweetness of Race” examines the sensorial effects of lexical-gustatory synesthesia in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth (2010). In this documentation of how words taste, whiteness becomes associated with the taste of sugar and its addictive properties. Throughout the novel, whiteness becomes legible as an object of addiction that defends against the failed ideals of self-possessed human personhood—a cornerstone to white supremacy. The novel then reveals opportunities to reorganize the senses and ideas of personhood as a means to disrupt particularly harmful appetites for racialized intimacies.