Hanna Garth

We view this seminar as an opportunity to articulate and define future visions for Black food justice scholarship within and beyond anthropology. This workshop builds upon burgeoning conversations within anthropology at the intersections of critical food studies and Black studies. The primary aim of this seminar is to more explicitly engage with Blackness in the anthropology of food, thereby advancing distinctive and innovative anthropological approaches to Black food justice. We adopt an expansive perspective and hope to draw scholarship from the Black diaspora to theorize a broad range of Black experiences. From the African continent to the Caribbean and the Americas, we will prioritize work in regions affected by transatlantic slavery to understand and theorize Black (food) life within the “afterlives of slavery” (Hartman, 2007). We position Blackness as a global, relational food phenomenon. As ethnographers of everyday life working as food justice scholars and activists in the U.S. and beyond for over a decade each, we are excited about the potential to strengthen this field in ways that can have material implications for protecting, nourishing, and cherishing Black life. We hope to foster a seminar that shares rich narratives of food and Blackness across diverse groups and communities.