Dethroning the deceitful pork chop : rethinking African American foodways from slavery to Obama / edited by Jennifer Jensen Wallach.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Sharpless, Rebecca, writer of afterword.

Williams-Forson, Psyche A., writer of foreword.

Wallach, Jennifer Jensen, 1974- editor.

Series:

Food and foodways.

Food and foodways

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Food preferences--United States.

Food preferences.

Food habits--United States.

Food habits.

African Americans--Food.

African Americans.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (324 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Fayetteville, Arkansas : University of Arkansas Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The fifteen essays collected in Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop utilize a wide variety of methodological perspectives to explore African American food expressions from slavery up through the present. The volume offers fresh insights into a growing field beginning to reach maturity. The contributors demonstrate that throughout time black people have used food practices as a means of overtly resisting white oppression--through techniques like poison, theft, deception, and magic--or more subtly as a way of asserting humanity and ingenuity, revealing both cultural continuity and improvisational finesse. Collectively, the authors complicate generalizations that conflate African American food culture with southern-derived soul food and challenge the tenacious hold that stereotypical black cooks like Aunt Jemima and the depersonalized Mammy have on the American imagination. They survey the abundant but still understudied archives of black food history and establish an ongoing research agenda that should animate American food culture scholarship for years to come.

Contents:

Foreword / Psyche Williams-Forson

Introduction

part I. Archives

1. Foodways and resistance: cassava, poison, and natural histories in the early Americas / Kelly Wisecup

2. Native American contributions to African American foodways: slavery, colonialism, and cuisine / Robert A. Gilmer

3. Black women's food writing and the archive of black women's history / Marcia Chatelain

4. A date with a dish: revisiting Freda De Knight's African American cuisine / Katharina Vester

5. What's the difference between soul food and Southern cooking? The classification of cookbooks in American libraries / Gretchen L. Hoffman

part II. Representations

6. Creole cuisine as culinary border culture : reading recipes as testimonies of hybrid identity and cultural heritage / Christine Marks

7. Feast of the Mau Mau: Christianity, conjure, and the origins of soul food / Anthony J. Stanonis

8. The sassy black cook and the return of the magical negress : popular representations of black women's food work / Kimberly D. Nettles-Barcelón

9. Mighty matriarchs kill it with a skillet : critically reading popular representations of black womanhood and food / Jessica Kenyatta Walker

10. Looking through prism optics : toward an understanding of Michelle Obama's food reform .. Lindsey R. Swindall

part III. Politics

11. Theft, food labor, and culinary insurrection in the Virginia plantation yard / Christopher Farrish

12. Dethroning the deceitful pork chop : food reform at the Tuskegee Institute / Jennifer Jensen Wallach

13. Domestic restaurants, foreign tongues : performing African and eating American in the US civil rights era / Audrey Russek

14. Freedom's farms : activism and sustenance in rural Mississippi / Angela Jill Cooley

15. After forty acres : food security, urban agriculture, and black food citizenship / Vivian N. Halloran

Afterword / Rebecca Sharpless.

Notes:

"Foreword by Psyche Williams-Forson ; afterword by Rebecca Sharpless"--Cover.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-61075-568-5

OCLC:

914706409