Recipes for Respect

African American Meals and Meaning
Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8203-5366-1
Verlag: University of Georgia Press

Buch, Englisch, 168 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 375 g

Reihe: Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place

Food studies, once trendy, has settled into the public arena. In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. Recipes for Respect bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing nearly to the present day, African Americans have often been stereotyped as illiterate kitchen geniuses. Rafia Zafar addresses this error, highlighting the long history of accomplished African Americans within our culinary traditions, as well as the literary and entrepreneurial strategies for civil rights and respectability woven into the written records of dining, cooking, and serving. Whether revealed in cookbooks or fiction, memoirs or hotel-keeping manuals, agricultural extension bulletins or library collections, foodways knowledge sustained Black strategies for self-reliance and dignity, the preservation of historical memory, and civil rights and social mobility. If, to follow Mary Douglas’s dictum, food is a field of action?that is, a venue for social intimacy, exchange, or aggression?African American writing about foodways constitutes an underappreciated critique of the racialized social and intellectual spaces of the United States.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Zafar, Rafia

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Sport | Tourismus | Freizeit Kochen, Essen, Trinken
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Sachkultur, Materielle Kultur
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde

Über Autor(innen)

John T. Edge is the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including the foodways volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

Sara Camp Milam is the Southern Foodways Alliance's managing editor. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Rafia Zafar is a professor of English, African and African American studies, and American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the coeditor, with F. N. Boney and Richard L. Hume, of God Made Man, Man Made the Slave: The Autobiography of George Teamoh. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Virginia Center for the Humanities. She was also the NEH Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.