Johanna Obenda

When we began curating Memory Dishes, we wanted to work collaboratively with the Providence community to share stories of African diasporic cooking. That goal led to incredible relationships forged with six generous, open, and dynamic families. Human connections are central to the exhibit in both its content and form. In this exhibition it is important that the families highlighted in Memory Dishes tell their cooking histories in their own voices. Thus, the exhibit centers their oral histories and is multifaceted—textual, digital, and object-based—to match the complexities of the families’ stories and the world of African diasporic cooking. Thank you to the Jones, Powell, da Graça, Alcantara, Aubourg, and Malabre families for allowing us to amplify your voices in this space. And thank you to the CSSJ for allowing me the opportunity to explore a non-traditional mode of curating, straddling the lines of history, culture, and art.

Why African diasporic cooking? The culinary presence of enslaved Africans and their descendants are evident in many of the foods we enjoy today, from gumbo to barbeque. Rhode Island is a dynamic part of the African diaspora, a constant site of migration which has been shaped by the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Great Migration from the South in the twentieth century, and contemporary immigration. The people of African descent who have made Rhode Island home through these waves of migration have left a specific mark on the culinary scene. I was particularly drawn to the area’s contemporary moment, where Black American food comes from the Southern United States, Africa, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. This is why the exhibition centers contemporary Rhode Islanders of different diasporic backgrounds. In the food stories of these Rhode Islanders of African descent, past histories are carried into the present through memory.

Women are at the heart of African diasporic cooking—this is the theme that became the most evident as we collected oral histories from the families. Not only were all of the interviewees women, most cited women cooks (grandmothers, mothers, aunts, domestic workers) as the most prominent cooking influences in their lives. It became clear that it was not the specific food items that should be highlighted in the exhibition but the interpersonal relationships between the women who prepared said food. The importance of these relationships informed our decision to film the women of Memory Dishes cooking meals central to their personal and cultural identities, so that these essential interactions could be highlighted in the exhibit. While many interviewees highlight the ways cooking is shared intergenerationally amongst women, they also point to a shift in the traditional gendering of African diasporic cooking as mothers and grandmothers pass culinary traditions to sons and grandsons. This is one of the many reminders that African diasporic cooking is not a static practice simply passed down unaltered, butone that is reimagined and reconfigured through each generation to fit the needs and reality of the moment.

This exhibition makes it clear that cooking, while a seemingly quotidian process, is a complex practice that can highlight social relationships, individual histories, and collective memories. Memory Dishes has been an exploration into the families’ identities as much as it has been about food. While all members acknowledge having culinary roots connected to the continent of Africa, they possess several different identities—Latina, African American, Black, African. These identities are as vast and complex as the dishes they cook, with some overlapping with each other and others remaining distinct. Like African diasporic cooking, the beauty of the diaspora lies both in its common roots and in its unique contemporary manifestations. I hope visitors are able to see themselves in the food histories and meals of the families of Memory Dishes, if not explicitly, in the ways that memory and the past impact so much of our present, even down to what we put on our plates. Often we turn to exceptional figures and moments to glean knowledge about the human condition, but there is an infinite amount of knowledge, experience, and history Exhibition Gallery living within ourselves and our own communities, and—through our memories—in our ancestors. I hope the exhibit inspires people to reflect on their own memory dishes and think about the significance of the everyday.

Johanna Obenda is a Masters student at Brown University’s Center for the Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage (JNBC) and Graduate Fellow for the Study of the Public History of Slavery a joint appointment at the JNBC and Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Her work uses multimedia platforms including photography, video, film, and audio pieces to explore topics relating to Black identity. She has worked on projects at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.