This course investigates the traditions and symbolics of food and eating in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora -- wherever people of African descent have migrated, settled, or have been forced to move. We will examine historical processes which have led to the development of certain foodways and explore the ways that these traditions play out on the ground today. We will begin by examining some examples of culinary tradition in different African spaces both in the past and present. We’ll be moving on to see how cooking traditions changed and morphed as people moved across oceans and land. We’ll investigate Caribbean, American (United States), and other Diasporic traditions, examining the ways people of African descent influenced cooking, eating and meaning in the new cultural worlds they entered and how the local traditions in these new spaces had an influence on these cooks’ culinary experiences.
 

Food is much more than a biological need for human beings. Human beings are meaning-makers, inseparable from the cultural frameworks in which they find themselves enmeshed. What people eat, the way they eat, and whether or not certain kinds of people prepare or provide food for others is every bit as much symbolic as it is rooted in biological survival. In all cultures, people create self-identity, claim ethnic and national affiliation and affirm our maleness and femaleness with the foods we consume, purchase, prepare, select, or order from a menu. Concentrating on African spaces and cultural traditions as well as on traditions in other places in the world where people of African descent live, we will be exploring food and eating in this course in relationship to such topics as taboo, sexuality, bodies, ritual, kinship, beauty, and temperance and excess. This course will help students to investigate the way the foods people eat—or don’t eat—hold meaning for people within a variety of cultural contexts.