AFR 309 - Consuming Culture: Food & Identity Across the Afro-Americas

This interdisciplinary course intends to examine an array of socio-cultural questions about Afro-Latin America and the role that food has had in constructing and imagining Afro-Latin American communities and subjectivities. By placing Afro-Latin America at the center as subjects and knowledge producers, this course commits to an intentional practice of learning from and of the Global South and decentering the United States, and the west more broadly, within the arena of political, intellectual, and cultural production. Beginning with Brazil, the country that has the largest Afro-descendent population outside of Africa and once heralded internationally as a “racial democracy,” we will examine the ways that food has served to both reinforce and disrupt socio-cultural assumptions and stereotypes related to race, gender, and class. We will examine food’s relationship to questions of gender norms, sexuality and labor and place these conceptualizations in dialogue with other countries and Afro-descendent populations across the Americas. We will end the course placing Afro-Latin America in dialogue with the Afro-Latinx diaspora and African Americans.

Satisfies Africana Studies major and minor requirement
Satisfies Latin American Studies major and minor requirement
Satisfies Cultural Diversity requirement