Bodies of revolt: consuming and serving in Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi

ABSTRACT

Scholarly work at the intersections of food and critical race studies has long articulated the historic and pervasive effects of racial hierarchy on the work and culture that surrounds food preparation. Drawing upon such work, this paper conducts a close reading of Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi to demonstrate how the author describes a broader system of racial oppression through her own experiences with both hunger and revulsion in the presence of unclean food. Ultimately, Moody’s careful illustrations of a racialized food system become her opportunity to critique the alimentary terms by which Black women have been interpolated into a white-dominated public culture, and controvert those terms in an act of anti-racist activism: desegregating the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• domestic service
• food and literary studies
• civil rights

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Meredith Kelling

Meredith Kelling is a graduate student in Literature and American Culture. In her dissertation project, she explores a theory of “passable” writing, or women’s writing which—marked as mediocre, nonliterary, ephemeral, or dismissible—is capable of circulating information and establishing feminist, working class, and antiracist solidarity under the watchful eyes of disapproving readers and publics. An earlier version of this article received ASFS’s Alex McIntosh Graduate Award.