| Chicken has played prominent roles in the lives of African American women. This African American foodways and material culture dissertation articulates the complexity of black women's legacies with food as a form of cultural work. Black women have employed chicken in myriad ways to provide for their families, shape a distinctive culture, define themselves, and exert agency in the face of racist and hostile environments. While acknowledging the negative interpretations of black culture associated with chicken imagery, this study privileges instead the ways black women (and men) have forged their own self-definitions and relationships to "the gospel bird.";These associations with chicken suggest the central organizing themes of this study: how black women arrive at varying degrees of self-definition using a material object like chicken, how they defy conventional representations of blackness, and how they exert agency in diverse ways. Understanding these phenomenon clarify how present interpretations of this association are rooted in a racist, denigrating, and yet agency-filled past.;This study suggests a model for further studies in African American life and culture, including foodways. Examining various representations of African American interactions with chicken debunks the racist imagery that has helped to shape venerable perceptions about black people and food. Methodologies in foodways, material culture studies, ethnography, literary criticism, and cultural studies are used to reread a broad range of primary and secondary sources---legal statutes, greetings cards, stereoviews, sheet music, photographs, literature, art, and film---from perspectives of black people. Focusing on women discloses traditions and practices of feminism that inhere in and around food---greatly exceeding simply domesticity.;Race, class, gender, and power tensions that surround chicken, black women's self-actualization, self-definition, and self-awareness, chicken in African American travel narratives, as a tool for "signifyin'" by church folks, and gender malpractice also emerge in this study. Close readings are given to literature, popular fiction, film, culture, and art, including: BeBe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992), Ann Allen Shockley's Say Jesus and Come to Me (1982), Chris Rock's "Bigger and Blacker" (1999), George Tillman, Jr.'s Soul Food (1999), and Kara Walker's "Keys to the Coop" (1997). |
