Recipes for Respect - Rafia Zafar

Rafia Zafar, professor of English, African and African American studies, and American culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis will discuss and sign her book:

Recipes for Respect - African American Meals and Meaning

How foodways writing influenced African American culture in the United States

"Drawing on Mary Douglas's early insight that 'food is a field of social action,' Rafia Zafar carefully braids strands of culinary history, authorship, and politics in African American culture to demonstrate how writers and cooks (and writer-cooks) used foodways to intervene in questions of political and social advancement. Recipes for Respect is a thoroughly engaging trip through African American gastronomic life that replaces stereotype and flattened ideas about African-American relations with food with a supple, wide-ranging picture of the black men and women who wrote, planted and cooked their way into new positions in American life". (Kim F. Hall author of Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England)