

An edition of Black hunger (1999)
soul food and America
By Doris Witt
Publish Date
2004
Publisher
University of Minnesota Press
Language
eng
Pages
292
Description:
The creation of the Aunt Jemima trademark from an 1889 vaudeville performance of a play called "The Emigrant" helped codify a pervasive connection between African American women and food. In Black Hunger, Doris Witt demonstrates how this connection has operated as a central structuring dynamic of twentieth-century U.S. psychic, cultural, sociopolitical, and economic life. Witt draws on recent work in social history and cultural studies to argue for food as an interpretive paradigm which can challenge the privileging of music in scholarship on African American culture, destabilize constrictive disciplinary boundaries in the academy, and enhance our understanding of how individual and collective identities are established.