Abstract
Abstract: This essay traces Virginia Woolf’s metaphoric and structural employment of Asian or Asiatic food in portraying race in and beyond the third chapter of Woolf’s mock-biography, Orlando . The relationship between food and feminist aesthetics in Woolf scholarship has mainly been discussed based on their prescribed meanings within Western cultural and political contexts. This essay challenges the dominant reading by analyzing how Woolf’s construction of white feminist authorship in the novel owes much to her Orientalist rendering of Asian or Asiatic food as a racial trope that heightens the visual exotica and racial arbitrariness of non-Western bodies.