12 - Black Power in the Kitchen

Summary

“Black Power in the Kitchen” excavates African American women’s culinary writing, which has been relegated to the margins of the US and African American literary canon. This chapter provides an overview of key developments in the black female-authored cookbook from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It examines early cookbooks that exploited the “Jemima Code” for their authors’ individual advancement, the community cookbook that served the larger goals of racial uplift, and the experimental and diasporic aesthetic of soul food writing. Authors under discussion include Malinda Russell, Abby Fisher, Freda DeKnight, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, among others. What emerges from this account is a new understanding of how black feminist politics underwrites these literary texts, and opens up possibilities for understanding how these texts, in turn, bare on wider aesthetic practices in the United States – specifically, by reconfiguring the kitchen table as a writing table.