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Beginning with an examination of West African food traditions
during the era of the transatlantic slave trade and ending with a
discussion of black vegan activism in the twenty-first century,
Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African
American Life tells a multi-faceted food story that goes beyond the
well-known narrative of southern-derived "soul food" as the
predominant form of black food expression. While this book
considers the provenance and ongoing cultural resonance of
emblematic foods such as greens and cornbread, it also examines the
experiences of African Americans who never embraced such foods or
who rejected them in search of new tastes and new symbols that were
less directly tied to the past of plantation slavery. This book
tells the story of generations of cooks and eaters who worked to
create food habits that they variously considered sophisticated,
economical, distinctly black, all-American, ethical, and healthful
in the name of benefiting the black community. Significantly, it
also chronicles the enduring struggle of impoverished eaters who
worried far more about having enough to eat than about what
particular food filled their plates. Finally, it considers the
experiences of culinary laborers, whether enslaved, poorly paid
domestic servants, tireless entrepreneurs, or food activists and
intellectuals who used their knowledge and skills to feed and
educate others, making a lasting imprint on American food culture
in the process. Throughout African American history, food has both
been used as a tool of empowerment and wielded as a weapon.
Beginning during the era of slavery, African American food habits
have often served as a powerful means of cementing the bonds of
community through the creation of celebratory and affirming shared
rituals. However, the system of white supremacy has frequently used
food, or often the lack of it, as a means to attempt to control or
subdue the black community. This study demonstrates that African
American eaters who have worked to creative positive
representations of black food practices have simultaneously had to
confront an elaborate racist mythology about black culinary
inferiority and difference. Keeping these tensions in mind, empty
plates are as much a part of the history this book sets out to
narrate as full ones, and positive characterizations of black
foodways are consistently put into dialogue with distorted
representations created by outsiders. Together these stories reveal
a rich and complicated food history that defies simple stereotypes
and generalizations.
How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture, by
food and social historian Jennifer Wallach, sheds a new and
interesting light on American history by way of the dinner table.
It is, at once, a study of America's diverse culinary history and a
look at the country's unique and unprecedented journey to the
present day. While undeniably a "melting pot" of different cultures
and cuisines, America's food habits have been shaped as much by
technological innovations and industrial progress as by the
intermingling and mixture of ethnic cultures. By studying what
Americans have been eating since the colonial era, we are further
enlightened to the conflicting ways in which Americans have chosen
to define themselves, their culture, their beliefs, and the changes
those definitions have undergone over time. Understanding the
American diet is the first step toward grasping the larger truths,
the complex American narratives that have long been swept under the
table, and the evolving answers to the question: What does it mean
to be American?
The Routledge History of American Foodways provides an important
overview of the main themes surrounding the history of food in the
Americas from the pre-colonial era to the present day. By broadly
incorporating the latest food studies research, the book explores
the major advances that have taken place in the past few decades in
this crucial field. The volume is composed of four parts. The first
part explores the significant developments in US food history in
one of five time periods to situate the topical and thematic
chapters to follow. The second part examines the key ingredients in
the American diet throughout time, allowing authors to analyze many
of these foods as items that originated in or dramatically impacted
the Americas as a whole, and not just the United States. The third
part focuses on how these ingredients have been transformed into
foods identified with the American diet, and on how Americans have
produced and presented these foods over the last four centuries.
The final section explores how food practices are a means of
embodying ideas about identity, showing how food choices,
preferences, and stereotypes have been used to create and maintain
ideas of difference. Including essays on all the key topics and
issues, The Routledge History of American Foodways comprises work
from a leading group of scholars and presents a comprehensive
survey of the current state of the field. It will be essential
reading for all those interested in the history of food in American
culture.
Beginning with an examination of West African food traditions
during the era of the transatlantic slave trade and ending with a
discussion of black vegan activism in the twenty-first century,
Getting What We Need Ourselves: How Food Has Shaped African
American Life tells a multi-faceted food story that goes beyond the
well-known narrative of southern-derived "soul food" as the
predominant form of black food expression. While this book
considers the provenance and ongoing cultural resonance of
emblematic foods such as greens and cornbread, it also examines the
experiences of African Americans who never embraced such foods or
who rejected them in search of new tastes and new symbols that were
less directly tied to the past of plantation slavery. This book
tells the story of generations of cooks and eaters who worked to
create food habits that they variously considered sophisticated,
economical, distinctly black, all-American, ethical, and healthful
in the name of benefiting the black community. Significantly, it
also chronicles the enduring struggle of impoverished eaters who
worried far more about having enough to eat than about what
particular food filled their plates. Finally, it considers the
experiences of culinary laborers, whether enslaved, poorly paid
domestic servants, tireless entrepreneurs, or food activists and
intellectuals who used their knowledge and skills to feed and
educate others, making a lasting imprint on American food culture
in the process. Throughout African American history, food has both
been used as a tool of empowerment and wielded as a weapon.
Beginning during the era of slavery, African American food habits
have often served as a powerful means of cementing the bonds of
community through the creation of celebratory and affirming shared
rituals. However, the system of white supremacy has frequently used
food, or often the lack of it, as a means to attempt to control or
subdue the black community. This study demonstrates that African
American eaters who have worked to creative positive
representations of black food practices have simultaneously had to
confront an elaborate racist mythology about black culinary
inferiority and difference. Keeping these tensions in mind, empty
plates are as much a part of the history this book sets out to
narrate as full ones, and positive characterizations of black
foodways are consistently put into dialogue with distorted
representations created by outsiders. Together these stories reveal
a rich and complicated food history that defies simple stereotypes
and generalizations.
The Routledge History of American Foodways provides an important
overview of the main themes surrounding the history of food in the
Americas from the pre-colonial era to the present day. By broadly
incorporating the latest food studies research, the book explores
the major advances that have taken place in the past few decades in
this crucial field. The volume is composed of four parts. The first
part explores the significant developments in US food history in
one of five time periods to situate the topical and thematic
chapters to follow. The second part examines the key ingredients in
the American diet throughout time, allowing authors to analyze many
of these foods as items that originated in or dramatically impacted
the Americas as a whole, and not just the United States. The third
part focuses on how these ingredients have been transformed into
foods identified with the American diet, and on how Americans have
produced and presented these foods over the last four centuries.
The final section explores how food practices are a means of
embodying ideas about identity, showing how food choices,
preferences, and stereotypes have been used to create and maintain
ideas of difference. Including essays on all the key topics and
issues, The Routledge History of American Foodways comprises work
from a leading group of scholars and presents a comprehensive
survey of the current state of the field. It will be essential
reading for all those interested in the history of food in American
culture.
Jennifer Jensen Wallach's nuanced history of black foodways across
the twentieth century challenges traditional narratives of "soul
food" as a singular style of historical African American cuisine.
Wallach investigates the experiences and diverse convictions of
several generations of African American activists, ranging from
Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to Mary Church Terrell,
Elijah Muhammad, and Dick Gregory. While differing widely in their
approaches to diet and eating, they uniformly made the cultivation
of "proper" food habits a significant dimension of their work and
their conceptions of racial and national belonging. Tracing their
quests for literal sustenance brings together the race, food, and
intellectual histories of America. Directly linking black political
activism to both material and philosophical practices around food,
Wallach frames black identity as a bodily practice, something that
conscientious eaters not only thought about but also did through
rituals and performances of food preparation, consumption, and
digestion. The process of choosing what and how to eat, Wallach
argues, played a crucial role in the project of finding one's place
as an individual, as an African American, and as a citizen.
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 foodpractices 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.
How should historians use autobiography?Although historians
frequently use memoirs as source material, too often they confine
such usage to the anecdotal, and there is little methodological
literature regarding the genre's possibilities and limitations.
This study articulates an approach to using memoirs as instruments
of historical understanding. Jennifer Jensen Wallach applies these
principles to a body of memoirs about life in the American South
during Jim Crow segregation, including works by Zora Neale Hurston,
Willie Morris, Lillian Smith, Henry Louis Gates Jr., William
Alexander Percy, and Richard Wright.Wallach argues that the field
of autobiography studies, which is currently dominated by literary
critics, needs a new theoretical framework that allows historians,
too, to benefit from the interpretation of life writing. Her most
provocative claim is that, due to the aesthetic power of literary
language, skilled creative writers are uniquely positioned to
capture the complexities of another time and another place. Through
techniques such as metaphor and irony, memoirists collectively give
their readers an empathetic understanding of life during the era of
segregation. Although these reminiscences bear certain
similarities, it becomes clear that the South as it was remembered
by each is hardly the same place.
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