The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction and
Homegrown Caribbean Feminism(s) is a comparative study of food
imagery in contemporary fiction by Guadeloupeans Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau,
Haitian Edwidge Danticat, and Trinidadians Lakshmi Persaud and Shani Mootoo. Robyn
Cope's key contention is that the past quarter century of Caribbean culinary
fiction engenders the Caribbean freedom struggle in two senses of the word:
first, by imbuing the history of that struggle with gender sensitivity and
specificity; second, by dreaming up a new kind of creative, coalitional
Caribbean freedom struggle. Cope reads food imagery in Caribbean women's
writing not only for what it can teach us about the colonizer-colonized binary,
but also in order to gain insight into power dynamics within the Caribbean
itself - between generations, ethnic and racial groups, religious and political
affiliations, social classes and sexual identities, and most especially between
women.

Cope's approach, part of the
exciting new field of literary food studies, aims to recover stories that
cannot be told without food. By reading these works with and against one another,
Cope honours the great geographic, linguistic, ethnic, racial, political and
social diversity of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean women's
experiences with oppression and resistance. At the same time, her reading
teases out Caribbean women's common longing for affirming coalition, symbolized
by commensality, that liberates without collapsing difference. In The Pen and the Pan, the shared
meal and the shared struggle go hand in hand.