'I thought all you people knew how to pick ducks and chickens': African American Women, Food, and the Mammy Problem

A Lecture by
Psyche Williams-Forson
Professor of American Studies University of Maryland, College Park

Thursday, March 19, 2009
4:30 p.m.
Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall

This talk will explore issues intertwining stereotypes of black women and food and will consider the ways black women used negative perceptions about their ability to cook to their advantage in generating income and creating financial security. It will simultaneously consider the strong connections between the mammy problem and African American female domestics.

Psyche Williams-Forson is also an affiliate of Women's Studies and African American Studies as well as the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity at the University of Maryland College Park. Her prize-winning book, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, (University of North Carolina Press, 2006) was awarded the American Folklore Society's Prize for "superior work on women's traditional, vernacular, or local culture and/or feminist theory and folklore." Williams-Forson's book looks at ways black women use foods like chicken to arrive at degrees of self-definition and self-reliance. Understanding these phenomena may better help us to see how foods are rooted in complex relationships involving both racism and agency.

A Review of Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power is available at Chicago Journals.