Building houses out of chicken legs : Black women, food, and power / Psyche A. Williams-Forson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Williams-Forson, Psyche A.

Contributor:

Joanna Banks Collection of African American Books (University of Pennsylvania)

Joanna Banks Collection of African American Cookbooks (University of Pennsylvania)

Culinary Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chickens--Social aspects.

Chickens.

Meat--Symbolic aspects.

Meat.

African American women--Food.

African American women.

African American women--Social conditions.

African American cooking.

Cooking (Chicken).

Food habits--United States.

Food habits.

Food preferences.

Food.

Social aspects.

United States.

Food preferences--United States.

Penn Provenance:

Banks, Joanna (donor) (stamp) (Banks Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xii pages, 2 unnumbered pages, 317 pages, 1 unnumbered page : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [c2006].

Summary:

Chicken-both the bird and the food-has played multiple roles in the lives of African American women from the slavery era to the present. It has provided food and a source of income for their families, shaped a distinctive culture, and helped women define and exert themselves in racist and hostile environments. Psyche A. Williams-Forson examines the complexity of black women's legacies using food as a form of cultural work. While acknowledging the negative interpretations of black culture associated with chicken imagery, Williams-Forson focuses her analysis on the ways black women have forged their own self-definitions and relationships to the "gospel bird."

Exploring material ranging from personal interviews to the comedy of Chris Rock, from commercial advertisements to the art of Kara Walker, and from cookbooks to literature, Williams-Forson considers how black women arrive at degrees of self-definition and self-reliance using certain foods. She demonstrates how they defy conventional representations of blackness and exercise influence through food preparation and distribution. Understanding these complex relationships clarifies how present associations of blacks and chicken are rooted in a past that is fraught with both racism and agency. The traditions and practices of feminism, Williams-Forson argues, are inherent in the foods women prepare and serve.

Contents:

Part I. Encounters with the Bird. We called ourselves waiter carriers; "Who dat say chicken in dis crowd": Black men, visual imagery, and the ideology of fear; Gnawing on a chicken bone in my own house: cultural contestation, Black women's work, and class; Traveling the chicken bone express; Say Jesus and come to me: signifying and church food

Part II. African American Women and Gender Malpractice. Taking the big piece of chicken; Still dying for some soul food?; Flying the coop with Kara Walker

Epilogue: from train depots to country buffets.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [269]-302) and index.

Local Notes:

Kislak Center Banks Collection copy presented to the Penn Libraries in 2018 by Joanna Banks.

Banks Collection copy is paperback edition.

Banks Collection copy has embossed stamp "JB Library of Joanna Banks" on title page.

ISBN:

0807830224

080785686X

9780807856864

OCLC:

62762178

Publisher Number:

9780807830222

9780807856864

Online:

Publisher description