Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs - by Psyche A Williams-Forson (Paperback)

About the Book

Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power

Book Synopsis

Chicken--both the bird and the food--has played multiple roles in the lives of African American women from the slavery era to the present. It has provided food and a source of income for their families, shaped a distinctive culture, and helped women define and exert themselves in racist and hostile environments. Psyche A. Williams-Forson examines the complexity of black women's legacies using food as a form of cultural work. While acknowledging the negative interpretations of black culture associated with chicken imagery, Williams-Forson focuses her analysis on the ways black women have forged their own self-definitions and relationships to the "gospel bird."

Exploring material ranging from personal interviews to the comedy of Chris Rock, from commercial advertisements to the art of Kara Walker, and from cookbooks to literature, Williams-Forson considers how black women arrive at degrees of self-definition and self-reliance using certain foods. She demonstrates how they defy conventional representations of blackness and exercise influence through food preparation and distribution. Understanding these complex relationships clarifies how present associations of blacks and chicken are rooted in a past that is fraught with both racism and agency. The traditions and practices of feminism, Williams-Forson argues, are inherent in the foods women prepare and serve.

Review Quotes

"[Williams-Forson's] interdisciplinary methods--incorporating literature, print culture, history, personal interviews, and media studies--yield fascinating insights. . . . ["Building Houses out of Chicken Legs"] shows the potential of interdisciplinary study of food culture."
-"American Quarterly"

"A highly informative read. . . . I am sure it will become a permanent part of the foodway canon. Williams-Forson is an excellent writer who has done some interesting research and pieced together a highly readable book."
-- "The Journal of Folklore"

"Likely to prove useful to students of cultural identity and stereotype."
-- "Western Folklore"

"Forces the reader to think carefully about the role of food in black women's history. And this alone, as one cookbook author might say, is a good thing."
-- "American Historical Review"

"I cannot recall an occasion on which I learned so much from a single text."
Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"This is a wonderful book, a thoroughly researched, wonderfully conceptualized, and well-written study."
Amy Bentley, New York University

About the Author

Psyche A. Williams-Forson is assistant professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.