September 2005. The museum café is abuzz. People of every color are taking advantage of its wooden benches, easing feet wearied by the galleries above their heads. School parties commandeer long benches of their own, oblivious to the halo of empty tables developing around them. At a distance from their noisy voices, adults relax. Couples pour drinks, lone diners read the day’s newspapers, and scholars speak up to make themselves heard. Foreign tourists, unused to carrying their lunches on plastic trays, scan the hall for somewhere to sit. Together, all eat from the café’s award-winning menu. Taste buds jaded by...

Pretty soon, within a week or so of setting sail, all onboard would have grown tired of salt cod. Like the new maps of the world that greatly shrank the distance from Andalusia to the Orient, the increasing availability of this food throughout Europe over the course of the fifteenth century was a necessary precondition that brought the impossible within reach, enabling Columbus to persuade himself and others that the western ocean could be crossed.¹ Bacon could putrefy, and wine turn to vinegar in the tropical heat; salt cod alone endured most weathers, outlasting even salted whale and salted herring...

Like many landmark novels of the African diaspora, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) rejects linear narrative, telling its story from end to beginning and back again. No obvious plotline links its celebrated set pieces. No distinct thread links its southern protagonist’s attempt to ward homesickness off by buying a yam from a Harlem vendor with his earlier involvement in a boxing match held to please a white crowd (214). Eventually, though, it grows clear that these diverse episodes belong together because all share a concern with visibility and with the shifting gaze that U.S. culture casts upon its black subjects....

Of course, even if they wanted it, the organizers of the Black Family Reunion Celebration would never get permission for such a feast. The Washington Mall is far too acclaimed and austere a space to play host to the skirmishes and smoke, the booze and bawdy antics that greeted Ward on that midsummer’s day in Peckham Rye. Neoclassical monuments and memorials even now dominate this terrain, granting entry to more spontaneous and free cultures only under certain terms and conditions. A decade or two of good intentions are not enough to break their stranglehold. Kind words cannot quite dispel the...

Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978) has held great importance for Savage Barbecue as it has for numerous inquiries into race, identity, and the cultural bases of empires old and new. Almost thirty years after its publication, Orientalism’s frank talk of the United States as an “Imperium” following in the footsteps of Britain and France now seems less controversial than it once did, while Said’s identification of the fundamentalist Muslim as the emergent nemesis of Western cultures has come to appear prescient. No less influential, at least in postcolonialist and likeminded circles, has been Said’s understanding of Orientalism as that at...