Soul Food: Black Women’s Voices Missing from the Definition of a Cuisine
…but that isn’t why it’s called soul food.
How did we get to the place where this white man is telling us what a historically black cuisine is and is not? How is it that this episode aired in February 2015 and centered only white men in the project of ‘re-defining’ southern food? That the only people of color in this episode on the culinary importance of Charleston are either historically situating the work of white men or providing a means of making their projects ‘authentic’ or ‘worth caring about’? These are the questions that started running through my head as I watched this episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown with the black feminist lens that I have been developing in our class this semester.
The way I started trying to find answers for these questions was in researching soul food’s history and the way that it’s definitions have shifted over time to accommodate for projects of naming a black cuisine and more generally, a southern cuisine.
What I found was that the notions around what soul food represents were as varied as the actual foods that it tries to account for. The definitions of what it was and who could participate in its making shifted so much between the 1960s and today, that it was difficult to pin-point how it moved so far out of the hands of the black community. Most notably, black women were consistently missing from the dialogue of defining, yet were expected to inhabit caricatured roles in relation to food.
Layered exclusions and violences toward black women in the definitions and ‘claiming’ of soul food have created the marginalization of their voices in the project of distinguishing black culinary tradition.
Below I’ve made an effort to outline some of the ways this happened:
* The emergence of the term ‘soul’ during the Black Power movement to define a historically black situated cuisine. This effort stemmed out of the black middle class which was being accused of assimilation practices to the white middle class. Soul food became a project of rooting black authenticity in the historic legacy of ‘making something out of nothing’. But because of the way that women were often excluded in conversations about defining black culture during the Black Power movement, they were often caricatured instead of credited in this process.
* In the name of inclusion for the entire black community, soul food was often given a generalized historical origin as food of the enslaved Africans. But by not complicating the specific regionality and foodway roots of many soul food dishes, intersectional histories of class and race were not accounted for. When questions about what exactly constituted food as soulful and who could participate in it’s making and consumption came up, the project of soul food was complicated further.
* “A central problematic of soul to be questioned is, nonetheless, the emergence of this consensus that it should not be questioned.” (Witt 96).
In the midst of confusion about soul foods definition, efforts to claim the cuisine as uniquely black shifted how people began to define it. In trying to preserve soul food within the black community and prevent its appropriation by white food movements (particularly in defining southern food), ‘soul’ became something which could not be explained. You either have it or you don’t. It moved soul off the plate and into an embodied form.
* The black embodiment of soul re-kindled caricatures that were created by white women during enslavement to demean the talents of black women. Ideas that black women were ‘natural born cooks’ with a ‘gift for creating flavor’ instead of learned, skillful and talented, crept back into the cultural imagination when talent/soul was naturalized instead of credited. This further limited black women’s voices in soul food definitions because it took away the possibilities of intelligent creativity when imagining cuisine. This manifests in confining black women’s participation in food movements to historical situation or providing a feeling of authenticity.
This dis-jointed path is only exploring the surface of how black women have been excluded in conversations about food in America. But even in this beginning stage of looking into how definitions of soul and southern cuisine could be out of the hands of the black community, particularly black women, we can understand the pressing nature of needing to center black voices in food movements.
Works Cited
Davis, David A., and Tara Powell. Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. Print.
Ferris, Marcie Cohen. The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2014. Print.
Opie, Frederick Douglass. Hog & Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Print.
Witt, Doris. Black Hunger: Soul Food and America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004. Print.
