Colonial food metaphors in postcolonial cinema: the case of Michelange Quay’s Eat, for This is My Body (2007)

This article analyses the use of imagery relating to food and culinary practices and their relation to colonial power dynamics and stereotypes in films set or filmed in post-colonial contexts. The colonial history of the Caribbean is particularly linked to the use of food imagery in the definition of colonial power dynamics and the representation of colonized and enslaved populations.The works of American-Haitian filmmaker Michelange Quay exploit this imagery as a critique of Haiti’s colonial past and neocolonial present. The article focuses on Quay’s Eat, for This is My Body (2007), an oneiric exploration of race, power, religion, hunger, food and freedom, set in France and Haiti. The film is analysed through the prism of “food metaphors” evoking cannibalism, starvation, and gluttony found in colonial discourses and which persist in post-colonial representations and imaginaries. The analysis shows how these metaphors are visually represented on film, and how they are used to constitute a new idiom with which to describe the postcolonial experience in Haiti.