The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Race and Repast: Foodscapes in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature by Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis.
More than a means to physical sustenance, food is culture, and studying food is a way of understanding how people forge identity in a constructed social reality. In Race and Repast: Foodscapes in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature, Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis takes as her subject racialized identity and foodscapes, bringing fresh analysis to one of the American South’s most distinctive and revealing art forms.
This significant addition to Black food studies probes the beliefs, values and rules, both manifest and covert, embedded in the literary products of a society in violent turmoil, using various texts including Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman, Ernest Gaines’s “The Sky is Gray,” and Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. With an approach that crosses disciplines to explore the phenomenon of foodscape—where food and space come together in a layered display of power dynamics, belief systems, and material culture—Niewiadomska-Flis describes the milieu that was the backdrop for the Jim Crow period and the civil rights movement. Welcoming the strategies of cultural anthropologists, food historians. and sociologists alike, she concentrates on snapshots of southern social encounters that accentuate and intensify the conflicts and negotiations of inclusion and exclusion. The result is an innovative investigation of how commensality was performed and forbidden across class and color lines, one that points to new opportunities to process the racial conflict of this place and period and advances the continually expanding domain of food studies.
Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis is associate professor of American studies at the John Paul II Catholic University in Lublin, Poland.
Race and Repast: Foodscapes in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature will be available in December, 2022. It is part of Food and Foodways, a series from the University of Arkansas Press that explores historical and contemporary topics in global food studies. We are committed to representing a diverse set of voices that tell lesser known food stories and to provoking new avenues of interdisciplinary research. Our strengths are works in the humanities and social sciences that use food as a critical lens to examine broader cultural, environmental, and ethical issues. In addition to scholarly books, we publish creative nonfiction that explores these topics with a focus on food’s sensory dimensions.