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Event - this is a past event

Food as a Weapon of the Weak in American Slavery Accounts

Event information>

Dates

This is a past event
Time
5:30 pm to 6:30 pm
Location

Online- via Zoom

Institute

Institute of Historical Research

Event type

Seminar

Event series

Food History

Speakers

Urszula Niewiadomska (The John Paul II Catholic University)

Contact

Email only

Food reflects and refracts power, unevenly ascribing agency to both privileged and oppressed. In doing so, food is simultaneously a rhetorical tool of dominance and a means of insubordination/defiance. As depicted within slave narratives, food is a site of material and symbolic struggle, serving as a means of oppression and resistance. The diet and foodways of enslaved African Americans are significant subjects in several classic studies of slavery. However, only a handful shed light on the complex power relations embedded in foodways: on food as a method of controlling slaves and of enslaved people’s attempts to undermine that control. Indeed, food as a vehicle of everyday resistance has rarely been systematically analyzed as a phenomenon in itself. This study attempts to fill this void. It will examine how enslaved African Americans as active and creative agents used the production and consumption of food, as well as discourse about food, as a rhetorical means of resistance. 

All welcome - This event is free, but booking is required.

This page was last updated on 20 January 2025