Food as Hieroglyphics: Amiri Baraka and Black Expressive Culture

Year 2019, Issue: 51, 43 - 47, 01.11.2019

Psyche Williams-forson

Abstract

Writing in 1934, Hurston’s anthropological skill and cultural
familiarity allow her to capture soundly an essence of the beauty
and art of African American cultural expression. She notes, “Black
people speak in hieroglyphics”; in visuals and in movements, tastes,
and sounds. Often, these performances do not “meet conventional
standards” but they “[satisfy] the soul of the creator” (Hurston 80).
These forms of cultural expressions or hieroglyphics are the ways in
which African Americans perform group identity using dance, clothing,
music, language, art, and food.1
These are some of the ways African
American people do Blackness. J. Allen Kawan notes “groups utilize
expressive culture to reassert control over their bodies, critique white
culture, challenge stereotypical representations in mass culture, and
develop collective identities that transcend geography and time. Groups
censor these cultural performances for mainstream audiences who
often appropriate them without knowledge of their hidden meanings.”

Keywords

Amiri Baraka, American Literature, American Poetry

References

• Bowman, Bob. Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records. Schirmer Trade, 2003.
• Caponi, Gena Dagel, editor. Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin’, & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. U Massachusetts P, 1999.
• Ford, Tanisha. Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. U of North Carolina P, 2017.
• Gregory, Dick. Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat: Cookin’ with Mother Nature, edited by James R. McGraw with Alvenia M. Fulton, Perennial Harper, 1974.
• Hurston, Zora Neale. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell, Duke UP, 1994, pp. 79-96.
• Kawan J. Allen, “Expressive Culture,” The Department of Cultural References, http://tammysgordon.org/DCR/items/show/55. Accessed 3 October 2019.
• LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka]. “Soul Food.” Home: Social Essays, Morrow, 1966, pp. 101-104.
• Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: AfroAmerican Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. Oxford UP, 1978.
• Muhammad, Elijah. How to Eat to Live. Book No. 2. Chicago: Muhammad’s Temple of Islam No. 2, 1972.
• Opie, Frederick Douglass. “Food Rebels: African American Critics and Opponents of Soul Food.” Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America, Columbia UP, 2010, pp. 155-174.
• White, Shane, and Graham White. Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit. Cornell UP, 1998.
• Witt, Doris. Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity. Oxford UP, 1999.