Overview

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 foodpractices 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.

Full Product Details

9781557286796

Table of Contents

Reviews

Timely and illuminating, these essays set a new standard for food studies . An exciting read. CHOICE, June 2016

Dethroning the Deceitful Pork Chop formally marks the coming of age of African American culinary studies. The work amply proves that it is a very real academic discipline with range and rigor. As one who was around at its birth, I ve got to say after examining the essays included that the youngster looks very healthy indeed. Bravi Tutti! Jessica Harris, author of High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America

Overall, the collection is a great contribution to our growing understanding, not only of African American foodways, but also of the social and political dynamics that have shaped, and still impact, the way we eat and think about our food in the US. Fabio Parasecoli, Huffington Post

Author Information

Jennifer Jensen Wallach is an associate professor of history at the University of North Texas where she teaches African American history and United States food history. She is the author of How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture and the co-editor of American Appetites: A Documentary eader. Psyche Williams-Forson is the author ofTaking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World and Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power. Rebecca Sharpless is the author of Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960.

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