A Poetics of Food in the Bahamas: Intentional Journeys Through Food, Consciousness, and the Aesthetic of Everyday Life
Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: This research explores intentional food practices and journeys of consciousness in a network of people in The Bahamas.Intentional food practices are defined as interactions with food chosen for particular purposes, while journeys of consciousness are cumulative successions of events that people associate with healing, restoration, and decolonization personally and collectively.This research examines (1) experiences and moments that influenced people's intentional food practices; (2) food practices that people enact daily; and (3) how people's intentional food practices connect to broader spiritual, philosophical, and ideological perspectives guiding their lives.The theoretical framework emerges from a specific lineage of theories and philosophies of hybridity, diaspora, creolization, poetics, critique, and aesthetics from the Caribbean.The research explores how intentional food practices reflect expressions of emerging foodways and identities in the Caribbean and joins them with the history of consciousness and intentional food practices in African and Caribbean diasporas.Ethnographic research methods, poetic analysis, and constant comparative analysis provided a foundation for an exploratory approach grounded in the realities of everyday lives.A purposeful snowball sample of twenty-seven (27) in-depth semi-structured interviews provided a primary method of data collection, supported by personal journals, field notes, and document review.No food security research has been published that explores intentional food practices in The Bahamas generally or on the island of New Providence specifically.Key findings suggest a broad variation in people's intentional practices.The intentions underlying these practices reflect desires for individual and collective healing, restoration, and decolonization in their daily lives.By exploring their food practices, interviewees express how they find restoration and healing through visceral experiences with their bodies.Chapter 2 Literature Review A transformation of Relations of Resistance and Domination: Intentional Food Practices and Conscious Foodways in the African Diaspora "We lack, in academic discussions of food, the consciousness vividly apparent in the parent liberationist, decolonization movements the African Diaspora has construed: a transformation of relations of resistance and domination expresses decolonization through practices related to food.Articulating the complexity of how food ways infiltrate people's everyday space, desires and dreams are revealed through research on such divergent topics as consciousness and taste" ~(Booker, 2015a) sand slipping through my hand and the ability from necessity to Hold.Accept.Let go.YES, bey!That is what really puts us in the know …" ~(Booker, 2015c)
Author: Hilary B. Booker
Institution: Antioch University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2662984597