From Soil to Soul: Cultivating Black Food Joy through Embodied Practices of Care and Community as Resistance

This dissertation examines Black women’s lived experiences in the food-insecure Bronx, highlighting their collective work of growing and cooking to feed their communities and the joy that emerges despite racial, gendered, and class-based inequities. I center Black women’s culinary contributions to emphasize the role of Black foodways in cultivating a shared sense of humanity and cultural continuity across generations. While a global project of colonization has sought to dehumanize and erase, enduring Black diasporic food cultures demonstrate that food is social, spiritual, performative, and political. Grounded in a Black feminist theoretical framework and informed by critical performance ethnography, this project treats food as a site of inquiry through which to understand an under-researched dimension of Black life: Black joy and its expression around food. I explore themes of radical care and the social reproductive labor embedded in Black women’s foodwork. Specifically, I turn to community gardens and kitchens in the Bronx as spaces of inquiry to theorize Black food joy as a liberatory practice.My methods include archival analysis of oral histories, critical performance ethnography, and embodied ethnographic practices that approach cooking as a mode of inquiry, intervention, and interview, through what I name as vibrational ethnography. This embodied approach centers the Black body as a site of food knowledge and meaning-making, illustrating how the literal act of ingesting, preparing, and sharing food can generate joy and perform resistance to systems of oppression. In this way, Black foodways emerge as tangible legacies of resistance, cultural survival, and the performance of pleasure and joy.