Diaspora Dinners: Beginning a Conversation
Diaspora Dinners are a starting point to invite guests to the table to taste and engage with a culture. We are creating a space where people are encouraged to think more broadly about the experiences of diasporic communities through the foods they cook and eat every day, hopefully leaving with a better understanding of the lives they’ve tasted on the plate. For the first dinner we will be looking at the black experience in America through soul food, which is born out of the African diasporic community but a uniquely rich American cuisine.
To tell this story fully, we will begin in West Africa where the enslaved experience becomes the starting point for black life in this country. The majority of the enslaved population can be traced to Senegal, Nigeria, Gambia, Ghana, Angola, and the Ivory Coast. These were some of the larger “suppliers” of black bodies during the transatlantic slave trade particularly due to their expertise in cultivating crops that the colonized ‘new world’ would need to produce (e.g. rice, cotton, sugar, etc.). The forced dispersion of these people was slavery: the commodification and dehumanization of a people in order to acquire labor in a new country. American wealth was founded on the backs and in the minds of the enslaved. In recognizing this, we recognize that this enslaved population was skilled in all-things cultivating: planting, sowing, reaping, preparing, and ultimately, cooking.
A near-impossible task to trace with exactness, the African diaspora, from 1650 to 1865, can be plotted moving from the African continent to the Caribbean and finally dispersing itself throughout America. The south is the entry point for most of the enslaved population with Charleston serving as their Ellis Island. Looking past slavery, which was abolished in 1865, we see Reconstruction, then the Jim Crow era, followed by the Civil Rights Movement. The black population experienced tremendous, cacophonous growth throughout all of these years. The individual black person, in one lifetime, was told he had no right to his body before 1865. Soon after, he became 3/5th a person, and finally, he became human. Even then, the reverberations of these human rights violations live on today. It is a complicated plight to discuss.
But out of that pain came some of the most beautiful art known to this country. Soul food is one such art. Born out of the Black Power era, soul food was created to feed a people who were physically barred from being fed in most institutions surrounding them, and thus forced to cook their own meals. What came about was the creation of their own cuisine, born at home and in heart, in order to feed themselves and their community.
Soul food is the autonomy of the black people who built America. It is the embodiment of a peoples’ sorrows, toils, labors, conflicts, and resolutions. Soul food represents a defiance of expectation. It is also complex. Each root of its trunk is grounded in every state of the South. Individually, they hold up that beautiful creation that represents a people. Each region has its own flavor and personality based on factors like terroir and the major crop/industry cultivated there.
Although soul food has long been around, much has changed recently. In the last five years, the definition and perception of soul food has evolved wildly in America. It has become “cool,” absorbed by the all-too-familiar culture machine. The rolling juggernaut of foodie America has begun to mutilate and pervert what soul food means, and is.
This reductive phenomenon is typical of any industry: it grabs something complex and fascinating, reducing it to clickbait-headlines and superficial experiences. In the case of a diasporic cuisine, the problem is its misrepresentation of a people and their history. In reducing soul food to just “reinvented” fried chicken and “fine-dining” collards greens, one loses sight of the myriad dishes that compose and reflect the story of the African Diaspora.
Fried chicken and collard greens are emblematic, accurate representations of soul food, yes; however, there is so much more. In researching gumbo, you will end up in the Philippines. Who would have thought that? You cannot talk about red rice without talking about the jollof frice of Senegal. Sadly, these facts, or general awareness, are regularly lacking in our food culture.
We must be specific and contextual when discussing cuisines and representations of food. There is so much history and culture inextricably linked to food that is often conflated, misrepresented, and outright misunderstood. We all must be more responsible when discussing food.
The Diaspora Dinners are not setting out to be the authoritative voice on black, or any, cuisine. That is impossible for anyone to do. What it hopes to do is open the gateway, so that peoples’ ability to talk about food may be improved. Soul food is one such vehicle for this conversation to begin. What we hope to do is allow food, in this case black food, to be what it is: complex.
This is not to say soul food cannot be had in a fine dining setting, at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Nor are we denying its ability to be the topic of conversation on the Food Network, or constantly posted on Foodie influencers’ Instagrams.
Soul food can be glamorous. Soul food can be fun. Soul food can be entertaining.
But soul food can also be the conduit into the troubled history of a people. Soul food can also be an honest rendition of what happened. Soul food can be the immutable touchstone of the black resistance movement in this country.
The takeaway is that this is not just Kentucky fried chicken. There exists hundreds of years of pain, mutilation, resistance, culture, history, and power in each and every dish from soul food canon. This can be said of many foods. This is one people’s story, and this is where we will begin our conversation.
Join us for the immersive cultural culinary experience led by two time Chef Showdown Champion, Chef Alexander Magloire II and Culinary Historian and Johnson & Wales University alumna, Chef Thérèse Nelson of Black Culinary History. The inaugural Diaspora Dinner takes place on Wednesday March 28, 2018 at the Food Arts Center. Immerse yourself in culture and history when you #eatKomeeda, that’s how you experience food differently.
