In modern American gastronomy, the foundational cultural imprint of African American identity is a largely marginalized story. Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning by Dr. Rafia Zafar interrogates the canon of black authors, across disciplines, who’ve used food and hospitality as their subject. In this newest work, Dr. Zafar manages to craft a methodical and nuanced annotated proof for the definitive legacy of black agency in the story of the American table.
Recipes for Respect offers an opportunity to look beyond the page into the historic and cultural significance of each author’s translation of their literary form. In what Dr. Zafar calls her sankofa, or reclamation of heritage, she rethinks and reframes the work of everyone from Rufus Estes and Abbey Fisher to Arturo Schomburg and Ernest Gaines to consider a more honest and respectful homage to the lives that helped build this country culinary identity.
As part of a new online programs partnership between MOFAD and Gastro Obscura, please join us for a virtual event on Sunday, May 3 at 8:00 PM E.T., where Dr. Zafar will be in conversation with Chef Therese Nelson of BlackCulinaryHistory.com. The two will discuss Dr. Zafar’s work, the craft and function of food writing as historical memoir, and the foundational legacy of Black culinary life in the American zeitgeist that emerges as the central ethos for the forthcoming MOFAD exhibit African/American: Making the Nation’s Table.
Purchase Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning by Dr. Rafia Zafar here.
RAFIA ZAFAR
Dr. Rafia Zafar, author of the recent Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning (University of Georgia, 2019), is Professor of English and African & African American Studies and the Program in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis where she also directs the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program. Other major publications include God Made Man, Man Made the Slave (co-editor); Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (co-editor); We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870; and the two-volume edition of Harlem Renaissance Novels: The Library of America Collection. She regularly teaches classes on food & American literature and, more recently, on Black foodways.
Before academic life Rafia Zafar worked in publishing, at Doubleday & Company and Book-of- the-Month Club and, during college and graduate school, gourmet food retail at Giorgio DeLuca’s The Cheese Store and later Dean and Deluca (when it was still owned by Mr. DeLuca and partners). In St. Louis she has served as consultant to the MetroMarket Bus, a former city bus turned into a rolling grocery store and with colleagues at the Medical School on the importance of cultural knowledge to promote healthy eating.
THERESE NELSON
Therese Nelson is a chef, writer, and founder of BlackCulinaryHistory.com, a social network and digital archive she started in 2008 as a way to preserve black heritage throughout the African culinary diaspora, to celebrate and network black chefs globally, and to steward modern black foodways into this next generation.
GASTRO OBSCURA
Gastro Obscura's mission is to inspire wonder and curiosity about the world through food and drink. Its articles and videos explore what food and drink reveal about the places where they’re made and the people who make them. And In partnership with chefs, historians, and other experts, Gastro Obscura helps travelers and curious people experience culinary wonders firsthand.