Senior Research Seminar 31st October with Dr. Lilith Mahmud (University of California Irvine)
The Tale of the Chocolate Man: Masonic Friendship and the Consumption of Race in Postcolonial Italy
Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that “we are all cannibals.” Eating the other is a way to identify and commune with them. Drawing from my research among Italian Freemasons, an esoteric society that since the Enlightenment has pursued liberal values of fraternity and equality while remaining highly exclusive, in this presentation I explore the consumption of racial difference in postcolonial Italy. My analysis centers on an ethnographic tale: a white Freemason woman’s childhood memory of her first encounter with a Black man, whom she mistook for chocolate. Told in the context of an international Masonic convention, which brought together Freemasons from all over the world, her childish story of misguided appetite served as a parable to teach young white Masons how to relate to racial others. In its fraternal aims, the story deploys but also subverts colonial tropes of cannibalism, first encounter myths, and racial humor to impart serious lessons about friendship and cosmopolitanism. Yet, it also illustrates the limits of liberal humanism. Here I read it as a performative “text,” merging ethnographic, literary, and feminist approaches. Against the backdrop of Italian colonial and fascist histories, I suggest that cultivating a taste for racial difference became a marker of status and cosmopolitanism for upper-class Italians, as they established their whiteness and belonging in postwar Europe.
Lilith Mahmud is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research in feminist and political anthropology has focused on liberalism and the right, secrecy, race, migration, and critical European studies. She is the author of The Brotherhood of Freemason Sisters (University of Chicago Press, 2014), which was awarded the William A. Douglass Prize by the Society for the Anthropology of Europe. Prof. Mahmud serves on the editorial board of American Ethnologist and was previously Book Review Editor for American Anthropologist.