The production and consumption of food are perhaps universal experiences, but they also commonly function to essentialize group identities in ways that have been both emancipatory and oppressive. These papers engage critical food studies to explore the relevance of foodways, defined broadly, in shaping constructs of southern identity in a variety of media from traditional literary genres to cookbooks.

Literary food studies is a fast growing subset of literary and area studies, and the papers in this panel address the intersection between southern identity and foodways, especially centering understudied and marginalized southern identities.

Presenters will share time equally, leaving 15 minutes for unstructured discussion.

David A. Davis argues in "Richard Wright’s Resistant Hunger" that eating in Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (American Hunger) is an act of resistance to capitalist biopolitical controls. The book depicts hunger as crucial to Wright’s formation and exposes how racism amplifies hunger as a form of biopower, and he argues that existence is an inherent form of resistance to coercion.

Angela Rabin's "Cooking in Progress: From Enslaved Cook to Restaurateur" is the culminating product of the author’s documentary film that profiles Black women who own restaurants in Mississippi, focusing on Willora Ephram, owner of Peaches restaurant in Jackson, Mississippi. Rubin argues that Black women who dedicate restaurant space for purposes other than serving food underscore an important part of Black women’s history—as they have historically been denied access to civic processes via traditional means—and has noteworthy implications for gender and race.

Gayathri Suseel's “The Cookbook That Was Never Hers: Race, Labor, and Erasure under the Corporate Gaze” developed from an archival encounter with Julia’s Cook Book (1934), a promotional cookbook produced by the Standard Oil Company (ESSO, now known as EXXONMobil). While Julia’s name appears prominently in the title, her voice, biography, and authorship are largely absent from the text. Treating the cookbook as a material and textual artifact, the paper reads these silences as evidence of how corporate print culture appropriated and obscured Black women’s culinary labor.

Each of the paper's in this panel address African American's in the US South and the ways that food and food writing may be tools or sites for resistance, as in Davis and Rabin's papers, but they may just as easily be coopted by dominant narratives to support projects of white supremacy, as Suseel explains. Together, they encourage a critical examination of the affordances and limitations of foodways and foodways scholarship in emancipatory narratives.