The Restaurants Book or Black Hunger

The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where we Eat

Author: David Beriss

Is the restaurant an ideal total social phenomenon for the contemporary world? Restaurants are framed by the logic of the market, but promise experiences not of the market. Restaurants are key sites for practices of social distinction, where chefs struggle for recognition as stars and patrons insist on seeing and being seen. Restaurants define urban landscapes, reflecting and shaping the character of neighborhoods or standing for the ethos of an entire city or nation. Whether they spread authoritarian French organizational models or the bland standardization of American fast food, restaurants have been accused of contributing to the homogenization of cultures. Yet restaurants have also played a central role in the reassertion of the local, as powerful cultural brokers and symbols for protests against a globalized food system. The Restaurants Book brings together anthropological insights into these thoroughly postmodern places.

New interesting textbook: Eyewitness Travel Guide or Eyewitness Travel Florence and Tuscany

Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U. S. Identity

Author: Doris Witt

The creation of the Aunt Jemima trademark from an 1889 vaudeville performance of a play called "The Emigrant" helped codify a pervasive connection between African American women and food. In Black Hunger, Doris Witt demonstrates how this connection has operated as a central structuring dynamic of twentieth-century U.S. psychic, cultural, sociopolitical, and economic life. Witt draws on recent work in social history and cultural studies to argue for food as an interpretive paradigm which can challenge the privileging of music in scholarship on African American culture, destabilize constrictive disciplinary boundaries in the academy, and enhance our understanding of how individual and collective identities are established.

Table of Contents:

	Prologue	3
Pt. I	Servant Problems
1	"Look Ma, the Real Aunt Jemima!": Consuming Identities under Capitalism	21
2	Biscuits Are Being Beaten: Craig Claiborne and the Epistemology of the Kitchen Dominatrix	54
Pt. II	Soul Food and Black Masculinity
3	"Eating Chitterlings Is Like Going Slumming": Soul Food and Its Discontents	79
4	"Pork or Women": Purity and Danger in the Nation of Islam	102
5	Of Watermelon and Men: Dick Gregory's Cloacal Continuum	126
Pt. III	Black Female Hunger
6	"My Kitchen Was the World": Vertamae Smart Grosvenor's Geechee Diaspora	155
7	"How Mama Started to Get Large": Eating Disorders, Fetal Rights, and Black Female Appetite	183
	Epilogue	211
	African American Cookbooks	217
	Chronological Bibliography of Cookbooks by African Americans	221
	Notes	229
	Works Cited	253
	Index	282