Cooking up Southern Black Identity in Chef’s Table’s “Mashama Bailey”

ABSTRACT

This essay analyzes the rhetorical moves employed in Chef’s Table’s “Mashama Bailey.” Bailey’s narrative functions as a constitutive text, providing an ideal case study for the nexus of rhetoric, regional identity, place, and food. Rhetoric and food studies cross paths in three modes: production, circulation, and access. I address production, arguing that the text produces collective identity by tying it to food production and preparation. Then, I consider the placed rhetoricity of consumption practices. Finally, I address food access, reflecting on the imagined audiences for Bailey’s restaurant and thinking about the significance of that access from a sociohistorical perspective. In reflecting on the rhetoricity of these modes, scholars may discover a portrait of Southern Black subjectivity in the American South.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhetoric
• food
• collective identity
• regionalism
• black identity

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Dr. Anna Wolfe and Dr. Kristan Poirot for their assistance in the preparation of this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.