Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop: Rethinking African American Foodways from Slavery to ObamaJennifer Jensen Wallach 2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2017 Association for the Study of Food and Society Award, best edited collection. 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. |
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activists African American cooking African American cuisine African American foodways agricultural Aunt Jemima authentic beef black cooks black food black women Booker cassava cataloger century Chapel Hill Chicken Legs civil rights Clark colonial Columbian Exchange conjure cookbooks diets diplomats dishes domestic Duncan Hines eating Ebony enslaved essay farmers feminist food culture Food Justice food reform food studies Freedom Farm gender historians Ibid Indian ingredients kitchen Knight knowledge labor LCSH Library of Congress Louisiana Mama Mammy meals Michelle obama Minnie Mississippi MMtD narrative Native American natural histories Negro North Carolina Press okra Paula Deen plantation planters Politics pork prism optics race racial recipes representations restaurant Rice scholars sharecropping slavery slaves social soul food South southern cooking stereotype story subject heading theft tion traditions tuskegee tuskegee Institute University of North University Press urban victory garden Virginia Washington Papers White House white supremacy woman York