Vertamae Grosvenor’s Revolutionary Recipes

Abstract Vertamae Grosvenor is a central figure in African American foodways literature. She wrote four cookbooks and a nonfiction study of Black domestic labor, danced with Sun Ra’s Arkestra, hosted the television show Vertamae Cooks, was a correspondent on National Public Radio for decades, and performed in the films Daughters of The Dust (1992) and Beloved (1998). In each of these creative endeavors, Grosvenor educated readers and listeners about food, culture, and history. She also participated in a period of increased visibility for Black women’s literature. Vibration Cooking: The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl appeared in 1970, the same year as the first novels by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman: An Anthology. Like the novels, poems, plays, and anthologies by Black women writers in her network, Grosvenor’s writings about food are literary texts with political aims. Alongside and in conversation with Black women writing in other genres, Grosvenor’s work pushed African American foodways literature toward textual experimentation and Black liberation. Vibration Cooking was part of what Mary Helen Washington calls a “renaissance of Black women writers” in the 1970s and 80s and part of a Black feminist participation in and revision of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). Vibration stands at the intersection of foodways, Black feminist, and Black Arts literatures. It appeared at a crucial moment for Black feminism and Black Arts, and it opened up political and textual possibilities for African American literature.