Getting What We Need Ourselves - How Food Has Shaped African American Life

This multi-generational story begins before the transatlantic slave trade in West Africa and ends with a discussion of contemporary African American vegans. Demonstrating that food has been both a tool of empowerment and a weapon of white supremacy, this study documents the symbolic power of food alongside an ongoing struggle for food access.

About the author

By Jennifer Jensen Wallach

Summary

This multi-generational story begins before the transatlantic slave trade in West Africa and ends with a discussion of contemporary African American vegans. Demonstrating that food has been both a tool of empowerment and a weapon of white supremacy, this study documents the symbolic power of food alongside an ongoing struggle for food access.

Additional text

“Mapping the journey of African Americans’ cooking practices, memories about food, and rhetorical significance people give to foods, Getting What We Need Ourselves, crates a cartography that highlights the multiple routes and roots that lead to defining the complex, complicated and often contradictory nature of claim certain foods as those defining an ethnic group. Wallach offers a candid reminder of the dangers in oversimplifying any eating practices of a giving ethnic group or region or nation to that only reflect misunderstanding and promote racial essentializing: African Americans eat watermelon, fried chicken, pork and cornbread. She challenges this tendency by tracing how the foodways of African and African American people have had and has historical, political, and ideological trajectories that have never been just one single story. Wallach adds a great contribution to the fields of Food Studies and Ethnic Studies with the reminder that a group of people’s food practices, memories about food and symbolism given to food are always never static, but always changing according to concrete historical, political, economic and geographical realities."

Product details

• Authors: Jennifer Jensen Wallach
• Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.06.2019
• EAN: 9781442253902
• ISBN: 978-1-4422-5390-2
• No. of pages: 238
• Subjects: Guides > Food & drink > General, dictionaries, tables; Humanities, art, music > History > Cultural history; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Ethnic Studies, COOKING / General, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Cookery / food & drink etc, Food & society, Social and cultural history, Black & Asian Studies, Cultural studies: food and society, Cookery / food and drink / food writing, Relating to African American / Black American people, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Cultural & Ethnic Studies / General