Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (review)

Doris Witt’s study breaks important ground in highlighting food as a site through which to explore the interplay of race, gender, class, and sexuality. In this regard, her critical approach resists and encourages us to rethink the conventional prioritization of music as a lens through which to examine African American identity and culture. Witt’s key argument is that an intimacy established between black women and food has facilitated the production of a range of identities in the United States. In her words, “the connection between and frequent conflation of African American women and food has functioned as a central structuring dynamic of twentieth-century U.S. psychic, cultural, sociopolitical, and economic life” (4). The mammy figure as embodied in the Aunt Jemima figure is particularly useful in historicizing this problematic. The critical and theoretical perspectives on which Witt primarily draws in her cultural-studies-oriented analysis—feminist and gender studies, whiteness studies, queer studies, and, most significantly, psychoanalysis—prove to be highly effective and relevant.

Witt begins by discussing the implications, given Tiger Woods’s complex racial positionings, of golfer Fuzzy Zoeller’s infamous “advice” in 1997 not to serve fried chicken and collard greens at the annual championship dinner the following year. Witt’s chapters examine food politics relating to figures such as Craig Clayborne, Elijah Muhammad, Vertamae Grosvenor, and Dick Gregory. She devotes the core of her study to an elaboration of black masculine panic about the proverbial black matriarch and the complex class- and race-mediated politics relating to soul food within black nationalism of the 1960s. Appropriately, she focuses her final chapter on the marginality of black women within the discourses on eating disorders. The bibliography of cookbooks by African Americans in the appendix, spanning 1800 to 1998 (which builds upon work begun by David Lupton), is an added treat that teaches us still more about the role of African Americans in culinary history and further confirms how exhaustively Witt conducted her research.

Witt avoids one obvious trap that a study with this orientation would hold. That is to say, her thoughtful methods of engaging black female subjectivity allow her to avoid performatively reinscribing, from a critical standpoint, the very problematic her study aims to critique. Scholars who are interested in critical work on masculinities should definitely place this book on their reading list. In addition, Witt has made a most significant contribution to the critical discussions of food and gender advanced in recent times by critics such as Sherrie Inness, Sarah Sceats, and Arlene Voski Avakian. It is worth noting, too, that in terms of their psychodynamics and sexual politics, films that have emerged since the completion of this book, such as Soul Food, Big Mama’s House, and the Nutty Professor II, were anticipated by Witt and have proven her thesis all the more. Black Hunger is compellingly argued, beautifully written, and fully engaging from beginning to end. Witt has given us nothing less than an intellectual feast.