New Publication - "Blackness and Bananas: The Josephine Baker Effect" in Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food

New Publication Alert: I have a chapter, “Modern Food as Racialized Performance, Blackness and Bananas: The Josephine Baker Effect” in Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food with MIT Press. The new book is available for purchase as of August 17, 2021. I just received my contributor’s copy in advance of the publication date! I worked closely with the editors: Benjamin R. Cohen, Michael S. Kideckel, and Anna Zeide who provided great feedback and worked collaboratively with myself and all of the other contributors. I also want to thank my cohort at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (2019-2020) who reviewed a draft and offered incredible direction and resources. Acquired Tastes is really focused on storytelling and thinking about how we’ve arrived at a table of modern food. As the editors mention in the Introduction,

By the mid-twentieth century, food in much of the Untied States and Europe bore the collective imprint of global trade, colonization, mass distribution, racist science, celebrity culture, and factory processing. In the mid-nineteenth century, it did not. The stories in this collection open a window onto how these processes changed the culinary and gustatory landscape. This book brings together historians who have shown that our current food system began to come together during a period of immense colonial, imperial, scientific, and global development around the turn of the twentieth century.

My chapter looks at Josephine Baker and her performance in the banana skirt in particular and its effect on modern food systems, marketing, advertising, and the advent of the celebrity endorsement. The erotic intensity of Baker’s banana dance readily signals sexual consumption where the bananas-as-phallus inspired such associations. Therefore, the gustatorial appetite and the sexual appetite are intertwined amongst the ingredients of sexuality, bananas, comedy, and, of course, blackness.

I hope you enjoy it. Here are links to purchase:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/acquired-tastes

https://bookshop.org/books/acquired-tastes-stories-about-the-origins-of-modern-food/9780262542913