The rhetorics of food as an everyday strategy of resistance in slave narratives

Abstract

Food is never just food; it is also an instrument of power in a Foucaultian sense. Food is simultaneously a rhetorical tool of dominance and a means of insubordination/defiance. As depicted within slave narratives food is a site of material and symbolic struggle, serving as a means of oppression and resistance. In this study I will examine how enslaved African Americans used the production and consumption of food, as well as discourse about food, as a rhetorical means of resistance. While Michel Foucault produced the theoretical scaffolding that rethinks power and resistance, his theories can be placed in a productive dialogue with the rhetorical studies of Kenneth Burke, Gillian Symon’s general conception of rhetorical resistance, as well as more specifically with James Scott’s and Elizabeth Janeway’s theories of the everyday resistance of the “weak.” Through these analytical lenses, I will place particular focus upon the role of food in slave narratives as a rhetorical means of defining and disputing identity, of establishing and violating various boundaries, and of challenging the status quo of plantations.