Jessica Kenyatta Walker

Dr. Walker’s manuscript, Her Kitchen is The World: Black Women and the Culture of Soul Food traces the construction of soul food using cookbooks, USDA narrative reports, television, and film. The project conceptualizes soul food as a battleground for Black representation within popular culture. These contestations often play out through representations of Black womanhood and domestic space. Her Kitchen Is the World finds that these images often implicate shifting ideologies of citizenship and national belonging, race, nutrition, and gendered divisions of labor.

Photo credit: Jasmine A. Golphin