Matters of the Stomach: How Enslaved Black Women, the Kitchen and Food Became American Cuisine

• In Event: 3145 - Positionality and the Construction of Feminist Theory

Abstract

Of the many stereotypes that haunt the history of the US empire, one that is violently present is that of the enslaved, particularly the Black enslaved woman, as naturally apt for serving, cooking and nourishing slaveholders and their families with a ‘culinary kaleidoscope’ where “…the African hand remained in the cooking pot” (Harris 2011). In fact, the violent remnants of the plantation kitchen continue to provide nourishing power to the reformulation of the plantation. It ruptures the present making the labor of enslaved Black women the continued sustenance of the nation-state. This paper is interested in how nourishing power – the continuous culinary contribution and influence fused and practiced by Black womxn – is a result of the union between Denise Ferreira de Silva’s (2017) ‘blackness as matter’ and Hortense Spillers (1979) concept of the flesh as distinct from the body. As the body is often the beginnings of analysis of violence towards a group, flesh offers blackness (as matter) new sources of sociological analysis where the Black female enslaved body survived, how their flesh created the foundations of ‘American’ cuisine (through analysis of a sensory engagement to food), and how the body and flesh converged to create new possibilities where survival and creation (as resistance) thrived. This paper uses matter as the basis for understanding how two violent spaces (the plantation and the Black woman body) meet resulting in a site of nourishing power. Nourishing power calls upon the enslaved woman body to utilize flesh as access to matters granted in interacting with new genres of humanity. This purposeful misreading of the lives of enslaved Black woman cooks, I argue, is necessary for understanding Black womxnhood already having explored new humanities using fleshly matters demonstrated in nourishing power.

Author

• Endia Louise Hayes, Rutgers University