Prof. Jon Smith (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver)

"The Ethics and Politics of Inventing 'Southern Food'" (December 2018)

The recent (post-1980s) celebrations of "southern food" are the latest in a long line of attempts to posit a distinctive "southern culture" or "southern identity" in opposition to an allegedly inferior U.S. national or "Northern" culture. This course asked several fundamental questions about this enterprise: Why on Earth do some people feel the need to do this? What are the ethics and politics of doing so? What is at stake?

The reading included landmarks in the Agrarian tradition (which is so much about overcompensating for shame) out of which popular foodways discourse so obviously springs—including John C. Calhoun's 1837 speech "Slavery a Positive Good"; selections from the 1930 Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand and from Louis D. Rubin's 1962 introduction to its reissue; and selections from the 1989 Enyclopedia of Southern Culture—as well as lesser-known critiques of their arguments by such major American Studies scholars as Henry Nash Smith and Werner Sollors.

With a firm grounding in the dominant discourses celebrating "southern exceptionalism," the course then turned to the contemporary "southern foodways" discourses that arise out of that model, especially the popularizing work of John Egerton and John T. Edge. Students looked at critiques of that model, and at a number of southern cookbooks, to see how agrarian themes continue in an age when they are supposed to be long gone from southern studies. Finally, the class looked at echoes and modifications of agrarian thought in Black foodways talk from Edna Lewis to Michael Twitty.