On 27 April 1989, the Chicago-based Quaker Oats Company announced plans to update its Aunt Jemima trademark for the 1990s. The two-page news release begins as follows:

Aunt Jemima, one of America’s oldest packaged food trademarks and a symbol of quality breakfast products for 100 years, will be given a new look this year. The facial appearance is unchanged. Noticeably different, however, is a new, stylish, grey-streaked hairdo, and her headband has been removed. Other changes include cosmetic touches such as a different style of collar and the addition of earrings.

“We wanted to present Aunt Jemima in a more...

“Beaten Biscuit” appears in a volume of plantation school poems by the discreetly credited (Miss) Weeden. Introduced to the public by Joel Chandler Harris,Bandanna Balladsis “[d]edicated to the memory of all the faithful mammies who ever sung southern babes to rest” (n. pag.). Like other works from this tradition, the poems hearken to a romanticized or, more accurately, fictionalized antebellum past, a period when “the old-time quality negro” (x), as Harris puts it, was “quaint and gentle . . . tender-hearted and devoted” (xi). The speaker is clearly intended to be a slave woman; the implied listener, probably...

Readers of Tom Wolfe’sRadical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers(1970) will perhaps recall that the March 1970 issue of Vogue magazine carried a column by Gene Baro on “Soul Food.” Published four years after chants of “black and white together” had given way to demands for “Black Power” (Sitkoff 199), and two years after the Black Panthers unveiled the slogan “Off the Pigs” at Huey Newton’s trial (Heath 64–66), the column begins with a quasi-religious fantasy of interracial gastronomy:

The cult of Soul Food is a form of Black self-awareness and, to a lesser degree, of white...

In fall of 1995, several of the most successful African American male rap stars—Ice T, Ice Cube, Chuck D, 2Pac, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and others—joined forces to release an album calledOne Million Strong. Intended as a show of support for the October 1995 Million Man march in Washington, D.C., the album demonstrated an important connection between Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam (NOI), sponsor of the march, and numerous black hip-hop artists. As Mattias Gardell has explained, although actual membership figures for the Nation remain small in comparison to the total African American population, its black nationalist appropriation...

In 1988 an employee of the Texaco corporation, Sheryl Joseph, informed her colleagues that she was expecting her second child. At an office party the following day to celebrate her birthday, Joseph was presented by her boss with a cake decorated with an image of a dark-skinned, Afro-wearing woman far advanced in pregnancy (figure 5–1). (Joseph, a light-skinned African American woman, had never worn an Afro and was still in her first trimester.) Inscribed on the cake were the innocuous words “Happy Birthday, Sheryl,” followed by the ideologically loaded speculation: “It must have been those watermelon seeds.” According to...

In her critically acclaimed 1991 filmDaughters of the Dust, Julie Dash explores the lives of Gullah peoples on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Brought from Africa to the United States as slaves, they cultivated indigo and later cotton while creating “a distinct, original African-American cultural form” because of their relative isolation from outside influences (Creel 69). Dash’s film focuses on a single day in 1902, when members of the Peazant family are planning to leave their home on Ibo Landing to begin a new life on the mainland. Family “matriarch” Nana Peazant cannot...

During the era whenVibration Cookingappeared, many African American women in addition to Vertamae Grosvenor were using discussions of culinary traditions to position themselves within an often hostile social, cultural, and political milieu. As we have seen, though, the discourse of soul was problematic not simply because white people were appropriating it and not simply because it was associated with the much maligned black middle class. The discourse was problematic because it also encoded American culture’s ambivalent attitude toward black women, its desire for black female nurture and its concomitant fear of black female control. Grosvenor, as a result,...