Food And Foodways In African Narratives

Food is a defining feature in every culture. Despite its very basic purpose of sustaining life, it directly impacts the community, culture and heritage in every region around the globe in countless seen and unseen ways, including the literature and narratives of each region. Across the African continent, food and foodways, which refer to the ways that humans consume, produce and experience food, were influened by slavery and forced labor, colonization, foreign aid, and the anxieties prompted by these encounters, all of which can be traced through the ways food is seen in narratives by African and colonial storytellers. The African continent is home to thousands of cultures, but nearly every one has experienced alteration of its foodways because of slavery, transcontinental trade, and colonization. Food and Foodways in African Narratives: Community, Culture, and Heritage takes a careful look at these alterations as seen through African narratives throughout various cultures and spanning centuries.

Food is a defining feature in every culture. Despite its very basic purpose of sustaining life, it directly impacts the community, culture and heritage in every region around the globe in countless seen and unseen ways, including the literature and narratives of each region. Across the African continent, food and foodways, which refer to the ways that humans consume, produce and experience food, were influened by slavery and forced labor, colonization, foreign aid, and the anxieties prompted by these encounters, all of which can be traced through the ways food is seen in narratives by African and colonial storytellers. The African continent is home to thousands of cultures, but nearly every one has experienced alteration of its foodways because of slavery, transcontinental trade, and colonization. Food and Foodways in African Narratives: Community, Culture, and Heritage takes a careful look at these alterations as seen through African narratives throughout various cultures and spanning centuries.

This Companion rethinks food in literature from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to contemporary food blogs, and recovers cookbooks as literary texts.

Moving beyond catfish and collard greens to the soul of African American cooking

East African, notably, Ethiopian, cuisine is perhaps the most well-known in the States. This volume illuminates West, southern, and Central African cuisine as well to give students and other readers a solid understanding of how the diverse African peoples grow, cook, and eat food and how they celebrate special occasions and ceremonies with special foods. Readers will also learn about African history, religions, and ways of life plus how African and American foodways are related. For example, cooking techniques such as deep frying and ingredients such as peanuts, chili peppers, okra, watermelon, and even cola were introduced to the United States by sub-Sahara Africans who were brought as slaves. Africa is often presented as a monolith, but this volume treats each region in turn with representative groups and foodways presented in manageable fashion, with a truer picture able to emerge. It is noted that the boundaries of many countries are imposed, so that food culture is more fluid in a region. Commonalities are also presented in the basic format of a meal, with a starch with a sauce or stew and vegetables and perhaps some protein, typically cooked over a fire in a pot supported by three stones. Representative recipes, a timeline, glossary, and evocative photos complete the narrative.

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics. Every chapter is an original research essay written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works. The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138713864_oachapter4.pdf

Cultural Heritage and Tourism in Africa examines the multiple and diverse manifestations of cultural heritage-based tourism in Africa from a regional, social science, and sustainability perspective. This book delivers a comprehensive treatise on the interdependent concepts of cultural heritage and tourism. Heritage is one of the most pervasive tourism assets worldwide and lies at the foundations of tourism in many localities, including Africa. However, despite its salience, there has not been a systematic examination of Africa’s heritage resources, markets, policies, practices, successes, and challenges in a tourism framework, despite the continent’s immense heritage value. This book reviews the different types of heritages that pervade the cultural environment of Africa and comprises its vast heritagescapes. It also examines the increasing potential for the growth of heritage tourism throughout the entire continent. The contributions in this volume delve into current thinking about space and place and their effects on heritage, mobilities, globalization, colonialism and indigeneity, conflict, identity and nation-building, connections with other regions through migration and the slave trade, and a greater emphasis on the ordinary heritage of Africa, which has long been ignored by tourism scholars and industry representatives. The chapters herein are authored by Africa specialists, most being from Africa, offering a truly African perspective. The chapters are conceptually rigorous and empirically rich with examples from all regions of the African continent. This unparalleled interdisciplinary glimpse at cultural heritage and tourism in Africa delivers strong value and is a vital resource for all students and researchers of tourism, cultural studies, heritage studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, history, and global studies.

One of the first edited volumes to encompass transdisciplinary approaches to a number of cultural forms, including fiction, non-fiction, oral expression and digital media. Environmental and animal studies are rapidly growing areas of interest across a number of disciplines. Natures of Africa is one of the first edited volumes which encompasses transdisciplinary approaches to a number of cultural forms, including fiction, non-fiction, oral expression and digital media. The volume features new research from East Africa and Zimbabwe, as well as the ecocritical and eco-activist 'powerhouses' of Nigeria and South Africa. The chapters engage one another conceptually and epistemologically without an enforced consensus of approach. In their conversation with dominant ideas about nature and animals, they reveal unexpected insights into forms of cultural expression of local communities in Africa. The analyses explore different apprehensions of the connections between humans, animals and the environment, and suggest alternative ways of addressing the challenges facing the continent. These include the problems of global warming, desertification, floods, animal extinctions and environmental destruction attendant upon fossil fuel extraction. There are few books that show how nature in Africa is represented, celebrated, mourned or commoditised. Natures of Africa weaves together studies of narratives - from folklore, travel writing, novels and popular songs - with the insights of poetry and contemporary reflections of Africa on the worldwide web. The chapters test disciplinary and conceptual boundaries, highlighting the ways in which the environmental concerns of African communities cannot be disentangled from social, cultural and political questions. This volume draws on and will appeal to scholars and teachers of oral tradition and indigenous cultures, literature, religion, sociology and anthropology, environmental and animal studies, as well as media and digital cultures in an African context.