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At the Table of Power is both a cookbook and a culinary history that intertwines social issues, personal stories, and political commentary. Renowned culinary historian Diane M. Spivey offers a unique insight into the historical experience and cultural values of African America and America in general by way of the kitchen. From the rural country kitchen and steamboat floating palaces to marketplace street vendors and restaurants in urban hubs of business and finance, Africans in America cooked their way to positions of distinct superiority, and thereby indispensability. Despite their many culinary accomplishments, most Black culinary artists have been made invisible—until now. Within these ...
A groundbreaking treatment of heritage survival in African and African American cooking.
Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santería and other religions related to Orisha worship—a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa—Stephan Palmié has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban religion. In The Cooking of History he provides a comprehensive analysis of these assumptions, in the process offering an incisive critique both of the anthropology of religion and of scholarship on the cultural history of the Afro-Atlantic World. Understood largely through its rituals and ceremonies, Santería and related religions have been a challenge for anthropologists to link to a hypothetical African past. But, Palmié argues, precisely...
Meatloaf, fried chicken, Jell-O, cake--because foods are so very common, we rarely think about them much in depth. The authors of Cooking Lessons however, believe that food is deserving of our critical scrutiny and that such analysis yields many important lessons about American society and its values. This book explores the relationship between food and gender. Contributors draw from diverse sources, both contemporary and historical, and look at women from various cultural backgrounds, including Hispanic, traditional southern White, and African American. Each chapter focuses on a certain food, teasing out its cultural meanings and showing its effect on women's identity and lives. For example, food has often offered women a traditional way to gain power and influence in their households and larger communities. For women without access to other forms of creative expression, preparing a superior cake or batch of fried chicken was a traditional way to display their talent in an acceptable venue. On the other hand, foods and the stereotypes attached to them have also been used to keep women (and men, too) from different races, ethnicities, and social classes in their place.
In the structuralist understanding as proposed by John G. Cawelti, a classical detective novel is defined as a formula which contains prescribed elements and develops in a predefined, ritualistic manner. When described in this way, the crime fiction formula very closely resembles a recipe: when one cooks, they also add prescribed ingredients in a predefined way in order to produce the final dish. This surprising parallel serves as the starting point for this book’s analysis of classical detective novels by Agatha Christie. Here, a structuralist approach to Golden Age crime fiction is complemented by methodology developed in the field of food studies in order to demonstrate the twofold role...
Dialogues Across Diasporas focuses on the shared historical legacies of members of the Africana and Latina diasporas, and the cultural impact of the African diaspora in the Americas. This book seeks to emphasize connections rather than divisions among different migratory ethnic communities via a reconfiguration of borders and ethnic identities. This collection of essays has three major goals: first, to foreground shared themes and strategies in the literary productions of women of Africana and Latina/o descent; second, to highlight the importance of the arts for community activism within shared diasporic spaces; and third, to illustrate the potential of artistic and activist collaborations a...
Finalist for the 2014 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions presented by the Journal of Africana Religions This is the first collection of essays to analyze intersectional religious and cultural practices surrounding the deity Yemoja. In Afro-Atlantic traditions, Yemoja is associated with motherhood, women, the arts, and the family. This book reveals how Yemoja traditions are negotiating gender, sexuality, and cultural identities in bold ways that emphasize the shifting beliefs and cultural practices of contemporary times. Contributors come from a wide range of fields—religious studies, art history, literature, and anthropology—and focus on the central concern of how different religious communities explore issues of race, gender, and sexuality through religious practice and discourse. The volume adds the voices of religious practitioners and artists to those of scholars to engage in conversations about how Latino/a and African diaspora religions respond creatively to a history of colonization.
Chicken--both the bird and the food--has played multiple roles in the lives of African American women from the slavery era to the present. It has provided food and a source of income for their families, shaped a distinctive culture, and helped women defin
Although Hip Hop is known to come from the streets of South Bronx, New York, its origins go far deeper than that. Unconsciously, the innovative souls of the 1970s Hip Hop movement demonstrated the captivating, vibrational sound of the five regions in Africa: Northern Africa, Western Africa, Eastern Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa. Thus, The Griot Tradition as Remixed through Hip Hop: Straight Outta Africa fleshes out the common threads of Hip Hop’s creative genius across the African diaspora and provides an analytical rubric as a guide to a greater understanding of Hip Hop. The author, Frederick Gooding, examines why Hip Hop holds such an important place within contemporary culture in order to determine how a genre that was so controversial and marginal could become mainstream and central. Through the use of various genres, artists, styles, sounds, images, and rhetorical techniques, Gooding analyzes how Hip Hop, when seen through the lens of African connection, can be appreciated for its regenerative and connective power to create relationships between people both nationally and internationally.
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