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Employing the interdisciplinary lenses of Black religious studies, food studies, and Black Feminist theory, this paper examines the everyday lived experiences of Black Mormon women (BMW). It uncovers how Black Mormon women navigate intersectional social exclusions like antiBlackness, misogynoir, and classism within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), and how food practices influence and shape their faith and identities. I draw upon two examples for my argument: Jane Manning James, a Black domestic servant for Mormon church founder Joseph Smith, and Nara Smith, a popular #tradwife social media influencer. From the historical to the contemporary, food is a central measure and tool of these Black Mormon Women's domesticity, racialized gendering, attempts at kinship, and spirituality. It is a contested space of material culture where Black Mormon Women struggle, negotiate, and strive for life, otherwise.
Normatively, the analytic of care has been theorized within a positive orientation situating care practices as a liberatory salve against anti-black violence. Care as such fails to account for how violence is ordained and materializes vis-a-vis care for the black. "Too black for care" writes Frank Wilderson is the structural position of the blackened. This proposal examines the religious and scientific violence that undergirds the ways in which the enslaved person is cared for and enacts their own care work in the slave hospital on the Butler plantation estates of Butler and St. Simon Islands in Georgia from 1774-1859. How do we think of care and what it means for the enslaved person to be cared for in this site? I contend that the exemplary violence and libidinal economy of slavery is continued and congealed within the religio-scientific analytic of care which continues to determine the blackened existence today.
This paper offers visual analysis of Carie Mae Weems’s now iconic “Kitchen Table” (1990) exhibit and situates the exhibit within a history of 20th-century black photographers who contested visual regimes of white supremacy by training their lens on everyday spaces, habits, and objects. In Weems’s original series of twenty gelatin prints, the kitchen table is a constant but not uncontested focal point. It bears witness to joy and grief, desire and revulsion, laughter and bitterness and ecstasy and agony. For Weems, the table in her home in Syracuse, New York, is a material object and a narrative conceit and a photographic creation. Through all of these registers, she curates the frame with bodies and objects and plays of light to tell a story even as she provokes a disconnect between what beholders see and what she wants them to know.
This paper investigates the critical resources contained in Black historical romance writer Beverly Jenkins’s self-identification as a “kitchen table historian” and her self-proclaimed work of “edutainment” (Turn On podcast). Jenkins’s naming continues and innovates in a legacy of Black women’s subversive cultural production at the meeting of historiography, literature, and religious meaning-making, ranging from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Audre Lorde, Carrie Mae Weems, and Karen Baker-Fletcher, and imaged through the kitchen table. I argue that the “kitchen table historian” enacts a spatial reformation of historiography in contemporary mass-market historical romance which eschatologically utilizes desire to center a Black historical subject. Analyzing Jenkins’s commentary against comments from white historical romance writer Julia Quinn (author of the famed, originally white Bridgerton series), I showcase how Jenkins’s kitchen table intervention upends the white supremacist presumptions of white-centric historical romance and rehabilitates Black historical consciousness through the erotic, a powerful religious resource.