Assistant Professor of Afro-American and African Studies, American Culture
Spotlight on AAS 104: African American Foodways and AAS 558: The Biopolitics of Food
Dr. Jessica Kenyatta Walker’s journey to teaching at the University of Michigan began at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studied American Studies, specifically material culture or the built environment. This involved examining architecture, houses, appliances, clothing, textiles, and other everyday items. She focused on the consumption of these products, particularly their “planned obsolescence,” noting how “we’re consuming more and more of products that seem different, but really are the same thing. And they’re supposed to be easier technologies replacing a more primitive tool. But actually, it requires us to buy five or six different attachments or adapters.” This topic was crucial to Dr. Walker’s training in food studies and her initial questions regarding the authenticity of food.
She recalls being in a course with her advisor on food and cultural sustainability, which examined not only “how do we get nutrition into homes that are lacking it? But how do we also honor cultural food traditions?” This contradiction is often seen in food banks, where there are overflows of certain food types because they do not fit into the cultural food groups of shoppers. A growing body of literature challenges the notion that “either nutrition is there or it isn’t,” recognizing that food is the last thing people tend to give up from their culture. This led to Dr. Walker’s current teaching focus on the authenticity of culinary ownership, which “inherently touches on migration, dislocation, family, pride, sometimes even shame and bigotry, ” This focus is also intrinsically linked to land use and agricultural knowledge passed through generations, where “we have dishes that contain a fruit or nut that points us to a region or to a practice in West Africa and enslavement within the Transatlantic triangle trade.”
Biopolitics was first described by a French philosopher “who had an idea that life, death and the energy of life are used to uphold state power,” which can make students rethink connections between abolition and agriculture in AAS 558. Dr. Walker pulled out this connection with plantation systems, often described as “open-air prisons,” that quickly became farm prisons after emancipation and stayed common for some time. As AAS 558 is a graduate-level seminar, she has students complete professionally beneficial assignments such as conference papers, book reviews, or articles. This summer, for the first time, she is teaching this course to high school students as part of a summer camp hosted by the University of Michigan. One assignment involves reinterpreting a food label. Instead of focusing on the nutritional facts, Dr. Walker wants students to revise its “connection to corporatized agriculture that draws from prison labor… pointing to hunger strikes or migrant labor strikes that are connected to a food product… a revision or critique of how a product is represented as disassociated from its cultural roots.” This project allows students to explore topics that interest them and use various mediums to express their points, such as music videos, documentaries, or even TikToks.
In addition to AAS 558, Dr. Walker created a full suite of courses at the University of Michigan related to foodways, including Food in American Culture and AAS 104: African American Foodways. She describes both courses as an invitation to “learn about recipes and traditions. But we will also slowly be talking about… not just histories of migration and enslavement, but also challenging the narrative of alternative foods.” She also explores the history of “agricultural knowledge [and] intellectual knowledge of the professors and students at early Black Land Grant universities” in the 1890s, which challenges the notion that the first movement to eat “better” started in the 1970s.
Dr. Walker really enjoys teaching AAS 104, a first-year seminar course, because of the opportunity to get out into the Ann Arbor community and learn about the history of Kerrytown being the site for the former Black Business District. Students in the course listen to oral histories recounting the people and food businesses that made the Ann St district into a livable community. They are able to sense that the space was made as a “15-minute town” where the “goal [is to] evolve us past this reliance on cars and people could choose from a range of close-by food provisioning practices.” Where Kerrytown is today, the African American community relied on the “colored Welfare League, farmers markets, saloons, tea rooms, restaurants, and cafeterias.” In addition to learning about how communities lived and ate, Dr. Walker has students learn about how many communities were displaced after desegregation – following a similar pattern to cities like “D.C., Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit.”
Reflecting on a similar question from her participation on a panel for the Embedding Climate Change in Courses Retreat, Dr. Walker encourages other educators to “harness that enthusiasm” students have around climate change while also being aware of the fact that there is also a high amount of anxiety around the same topic. She pointed out that this is a similar approach that she has when teaching about race, that there is this awareness and enthusiasm but also anxiety which can “kind of harden people to learning about it in a different way” or recognize a different point of view. To address this anxiety, Dr. Walker focuses on trust building and team building in her courses so that students can “be in this together and envision [themselves] as part of a larger community.”
For students who are interested in the topic of intersectional food studies, Dr. Walker will be teaching AAS 104: African American Foodways and AAS 558: The Biopolitics of Food in the Fall semester.
As a part of the Year of Sustainability, we are interested in sharing, uplifting, and highlighting stories about the people who make up LSA and have experience teaching about sustainability. We sat down with a series of LSA faculty to discuss their background and courses and will feature these conversations in our Faculty Spotlight series.
To contact the LSA Year of Sustainability Team, please contact sustainable-lsa@umich.edu.
