Recipes for respect : African American meals and meaning / Rafia Zafar.

"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 small tributary. Recipes for Respect fills this lacuna, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture. Beginning with the cooks in Uncle Tom's Cabin, if not before, and continuing nearly to the present day, black Americans have been unfairly stereotyped as uneducated culinary geniuses. Rafia Zafar addresses this disparity and highlights not only the long tradition of educated African Americans within our national gastronomic history but also 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, the knowledge of foodways supported black strategies for the maintenance of historical memory, the assertion of self-reliance, and the achievement of dignity and civil rights. 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 intervention into the racialized social and intellectual spaces of the United States"--

Includes bibliographies and index.

Recipes for respect : Black men's hospitality books -- Born a slave, died a chef : slave narratives and the beginnings of culinary memoir -- "There is probably no subject more important than the study of food" : George Washington Carver's food movement -- Civil rights and commensality : meals and meaning in Ernest Gaines, Anne Moody, and Alice Walker -- The signifying dish : autobiography and history in two black women's cookbooks -- Elegy or Sankofa? : Edna Lewis's taste of country cooking and the question of genre -- The Negro cooks up his past : Arturo Schomburg's uncompleted cookbook.

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