| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Psyche A. Williams-Forson. Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 317. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.
There is a lot more at issue here than chickens. Any reader who is concerned with the histories and representations of race and gender in the United States will find much to contemplate in this intriguing study. In her examination of African American history—and the issue of food and power in particular—Psyche A. Williams-Forson takes us from minstrel shows to World War II, from the novels of Zora Neale Hurston to the cut-paper silhouettes of contemporary artist Kara Walker. Moving through nearly two centuries of art, history, literature, mass media, and criticism can be a bit daunting. But that is the point. In order to appreciate the pervasiveness of associations of black women to food, it is necessary to catalogue these associations in detail and in myriad formats across time and space.	1
This book is part of the burgeoning area of scholarship known as food studies, which, as the author notes, has had surprisingly little to say about black people. Considering the central role black female cooks have played in the history and imagery of slavery, this is a grave oversight. But it is not only as cooks that black women have shaped American culinary history and culture; Williams-Forson does an excellent job highlighting black women's agency in the marketplace. Her first chapter, for example, is replete with examples of the ways African American women shaped not only markets but race relations and power dynamics in the Chesapeake and Carolina Lowcountry before the Civil War.	. . .

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