“Our” Culinary Heritage

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-445
Author(s):  
Catarina Passidomo
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
American South ◽  
White Male ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
European Descent ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
The American South ◽  
Racial Harmony ◽  
White Gaze

This article develops the concept of gastrodiplomacy—or the use of food to enhance a region’s brand and image—through analysis of two cookbooks: Heritage, by Sean Brock, and Peru: The Cookbook, by Gastón Acurio. Each of these celebrity chefs mobilizes diversity and multiculturalism rhetorically to suggest that contemporary foodways are an authentic portal to racial harmony and inclusion. I argue that these chefs’ social position as men of European descent perpetuates the “white gaze” of contemporary public engagement with cuisine and foodways because the historic and contemporary contributions of marginalized groups become narrative props rather than authentic voices. By focusing on two sites—Peru and the American South—this article demonstrates the function of gastrodiplomacy as a form of soft power that rhetorically undermines racial and class hegemonies while practically reinforcing them. The historical and social contexts of these two regions demand an analysis that incorporates discussion of the connections among foodways, culture, place, and power and consideration of linkages between the U.S. South and the Global South. From a sociological perspective, this article demonstrates the ways in which contemporary food movements often perform rhetorical maneuvers that obfuscate inequality by using white male voices to present foodways as common and universal.

Southern Eruptions in Asian American Narratives

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ho
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American South ◽  
Foreign Student ◽  
The South ◽  
Bruce Lee ◽  
The American South ◽  
Racial Harmony ◽  
Fitting In

This chapter discusses the emergence of Asian American literature and film about the South as they disrupt multiple narratives about race relations and racial subjectivity. It particularly studies Susan Choi's novel The Foreign Student (1998), Mira Nair's feature-length film Mississippi Masala (1992), and Paisley Rekdal's creative nonfiction collection of autobiographical essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In (2000). Asian American stories set in the South erupt the myth of imaginary lines between the past and present, arguing that the inclusion of Asian American voices signals not simply a pluralistic affirmation of racial harmony but the complications of understanding race beyond a black–white paradigm. Indeed, a true understanding of southern race relations crosses the geographic borders of the American South into not only Europe and Africa but the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia as well, because the South is a space that is implicated in larger transnational and global flows.

The Posse Comitatus Doctrine in Early America

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gautham Rao
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Financial Incentives ◽  
American South ◽  
White Male ◽  
Law Enforcement Officers ◽  
Early America ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
The American South

Courts and legislatures in colonial America and the early American republic developed and refined a power to compel civilians to assist peace and law enforcement officers in arresting wrongdoers, keeping the peace, and other matters of law enforcement. This power to command civilian cooperation was known as the posse comitatus or “power of the county.” Rooted in early modern English countryside law enforcement, the posse comitatus became an important police institution in 18th- and 19th-century America. The posse comitatus was typically composed of able-bodied white male civilians who were temporarily deputized to aid a sheriff or constable. But if this “power of the county” was insufficient, law enforcement officers were often authorized to call on the military to serve as the posse comitatus. The posse comitatus proved particularly important in buttressing slavery in the American South. Slaveholders pushed for and especially benefited from laws that required citizens to assist in the recapture of local runaway slaves and fugitive slaves who crossed into states without slavery. Though slave patrols were rooted in the posse comitatus, the posse comitatus originated as a compulsory and noncompensated institution. Slaveholders in the American South later added financial incentives for those who acted in the place of a posse to recapture slaves on the run from their owners. The widespread use of the posse comitatus in southern slave law became part of the national discussion about slavery during the early American republic as national lawmakers contemplated how to deal with the problem of fugitive slaves who fled to free states. This dialogue culminated with the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, in which the US Congress authorized officials to “summon and call to their aid the bystanders, or posse comitatus” and declared that “all good citizens are hereby commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law, whenever their services may be required.” During Reconstruction, the Radical Republican Congress used the posse comitatus to enforce laws that targeted conquered Confederates. After the end of Reconstruction in 1877, Southern states pushed Congress to create what would come to be known as the “Posse Comitatus Act,” which prohibited the use of federal military forces for law enforcement. The history of the posse comitatus in early America is thus best understood as a story about and an example of the centralization of government authority and its ramifications.

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

The Sociology of Country Music

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Ethnic Relations ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Race And Ethnic Relations ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
The American South ◽  
Political Realignment

How can a sociological approach improve our understanding of country music? This chapter answers this question by focusing on the intersections between country music history and the core sociological theme of modernity. Challenging standard interpretations of country music as folk culture, it shows how the emergence of the popular commercial genre corresponds to the increasing modernization of the American South. The genre’s subsequent growth and evolution tracks central objects of sociological study including industrialization, geographic mobility, race and ethnic relations, the changing social class structure, political realignment in the United States, and (paradoxically) urbanization. Country music is comparatively understudied in the sociology of music despite its rich history and massive popularity; this chapter shows that the genre and the discipline nevertheless mutually illuminate one another in robust and often surprising ways.

Case Study: The Southern Oral History Program

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall ◽  
Kathryn Nasstrom
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
American South ◽  
New Era ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
Integral Role ◽  
The American South ◽  
And Gender ◽  
History Department ◽  
The University

A case study of the southern oral history program is the essence of this chapter. From its start in 1973 until 1999, the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) was housed by the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), rather than in the library or archives, where so many other oral history programs emerged. The SOHP is now part of UNC's Center for the Study of the American South, but it continues to play an integral role in the department of history. Concentrating on U.S. southern racial, labor, and gender issues, the program offers oral history courses and uses interviews to produce works of scholarship, such as the prize-winning book Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. The folks at the Institute for Southern Studies tried to combine activism with analysis, trying to figure out how to take the spirit of the movement into a new era.

The Vanishing Servant and the Contemporary Status System of the American South

1953 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Arnold Anderson ◽  
Mary Jean Bowman
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Contemporary Status ◽  
The American South
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