How does Food relate to the study of Race?
Today's highlight person is Lori Barcliff Baptista, a 4th year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Lori's research investigates the role of food in the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. In her dissertation she conducts ethnographic fieldwork to assess how Portuguese and Brazilian immigrants have adapted traditional food practices from regions of their home countries into a local dining style that has come to represent the Ironbound. Lori critically interrogates certain assumptions and discourses about Newark, the Ironbound neighborhood, its residents, guests, and its function as a spectacular public dining destination characterized by low prices, large portions, and "food with tastes all its own." Under the guidance of her dissertation committee, directed by Dr. Margaret Thompson Drewal, she considers how food operates within a complex system of performance practices and epistemologies through which various interests are articulated. For additional information, please visit the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Below is an abstract of Baptista's research project (which I pulled from the web). It gives you a better sense of her dissertation project, and by extension, of what "performance studies" actually looks like and feels like at the level of research.
Stirring the Melting Pot: Food and the Performance of Inclusion in Newark's Ironbound Community
(Dissertation in progress)
Lori Barcliff Baptista
Performance Studies
Northwestern University
"Stirring the Melting Pot: Food and the Performance of Inclusion in Newark's Ironbound Community" examines the role of food in the Ironbound, a spatially and discursively bounded neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. It is an inquiry into how and why interested parties experience, represent, and make use of the Ironbound's contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian food practices. As a historicized, lived and imagined space, the neighborhood is paradoxically constructed as both marginal and culturally vital. Food avails itself as a performance medium through which central political, economic and social desires and concerns are negotiated. Often represented in popular media as an immigrant neighborhood perennially known for its ethnic foods, at times the Ironbound has been discursively constructed as a utopian counterpoint to commonly held perceptions of Newark's terse race relations, violent crime and listless economic development. Attentive to how food sustains, subverts, binds or bounds various communities in both predictable and unexpected ways and places, this dissertation considers the symbolic and material implications of shopping for, preparing, selling, serving and eating Portuguese and Brazilian foods in the Ironbound. It will also assess the significance and circulations of foods such as bacalhau (salt cod), the star of Portugal's national dish, and feijoada (bean stew), the national dish of Brazil.
Label: What is Performance Studies?
This is really interesting. I wish her well on her disseration.
Posted by
WiseYoungMan |
1/21/2008
Interesting. Food and America, all I have to say about America as a melting pot is let down the heat so we can all simmer down. We are more like rice and beans with potatoes instead of becoming a nice stew. How did I find you? We both enjoy Balwin. Have a good one.
Posted by
Jeremy |
1/21/2008