Summary Reponse 2: Ku Klux Kasserole and Strange Fruit Pies: A Shouting Match at the Border in Cyberspace

Nikki Ramirez


Ku Klux Kasserole and Strange Fruit Pies: A Shouting Match at the Border in Cyberspace Author(s): Sheila Bock Source: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 130, No. 516 (Spring 2017), pp. 142-165 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of American Folklore Society 


Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.130.516.0142 Accessed: 08-08-2018 17:10 UTC



Summary: 

Sheila Block, an assistant professor of Interdisciplinary studies at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. fFor this article she uses the Paula Deen scandal that took place in 2013 and what ensued on Twitter after the news went public. She brings into persepctive things like 'creative performance', collective digital identity, signifying, culinary signifying, and cyberspace borders. Block looks at collections of tweets and interactions that use the viral hashtag "#PaulasBestDishes." Through these interactions and tweets many different things(for lack of a better word) arise. First it shows a collective movement of 'black twitter' tweeting mock recipes such as "“please Don’t Separate me from my Wife and chitlins,” “massa- roni & cheese,” “egg- plantation parmesan,” and “cotton pickin’ candy.” to name a few. The author describes Deen's intentional forgetfulness of the influence of poor African American roots in her dishes and how she has used this 'southern' charm angle to rise to fame by excluding the slave and poor black roots in her recipes. The hashtag arose after Paula Deen openly admitted to using the N word and was planning a plantation wedding for her son equipped with an all black staff. While black twitter was in agreement and even engaged in self deprecating, witty, tweets, many non-blacks came to defend Deen in online forums and on FoodNetwork. Some linguistic professionals even examined Deen's language during the testimony and defended her language choice of how at one point she may have used the word, times change and so did she. Through all of these events, it was clear that people engaged in creative performace on tiwtter as a means to identify with the opposite side of Deen. They used culinary foods that are used as a means to mock black people (e.g. chicken, watermelon, collard greens, etc.) and created ownership and in returned ridiculed Deen by doing do. Many non-black people also joined the movement but were weary of their inclusion in this assemblage that was not directly affecting them so some treaded lightly and others were ineffective with their tweets to which Block breaks down and explains why they were so. Towards the end of the article Block mentions cyber border: where group group boundaries are identified, negotiated, and reinforced and how it was grounded by Americo Paredes, whose ethnographic work on the Texas borderlands shed light on “the generative power of borders and other contact zones." The cyber border was clear and those who were confused or ignored their roles whether in or out of the assemblage, were shown through tweets. 


Response:

There are so many levels in this article to dissect! But, I really liked this one. Block's structure is clear and flows well with the development of her ideas and critique. She makes sure to not just talk about one side of the argument but as well as those who came to defend Deen. She makes sure to provide a full overview of Deen's rise to fame and how she started and where she went after this happened. She uses quotes from Deen's books and shows how increasingly Deen showed some signs of politically charged content. I enjoy her approach to this topic by laying everything out and letting you decide how you feel about what happened. Including the term creative performance caused me to reflect on some things that might affect my own community and stereotypes we have claimed as our own. Block shows the different ways in which black twitter assembled and engaged in collective identity by being a part of this hashtag and the effectiveness of the hashtag.

Keywords:
Racism, Social media, Jokes, African Americans, African American culture, Folklore, Folk culture, Black communities, Cooking, Humor

Quotes:

“The #paulasbestDishes hashtag serves as a rich example of how long- standing forms of vernacular responses to racism merge with new generic forms in digital contexts.”

“initially created as a way to search for tweets on a given topic, the hashtag quickly took on expressive functions and became a resource for creative performance online.”

“When black people signify on foods, or engage in what psyche Williams- Forson terms “culinary signifying” (2006:142), they are invoking the multiple meanings encoded in the foods both in the past and in the present”

“The primarily black tweeters using the #paulasbestDishes hashtag were taking part in a collective performance, and humor was a central feature of this performance. The primary objective of this humor was ostensibly to ridicule paula Deen, though as my previous discussion shows, it did much more than that. it also created opportunities for critiquing and resisting the forms that racism has taken in both the past and the present.”

“folklore performance does not require that the lore be a collective representation of the participants, pertaining and belonging equally to all of them. it may be so, but it may also be differentially distributed, differentially performed, differentially perceived, and differentially understood. (bauman 1971:38)”

“Abrahams’ work on the display event as a “shouting match at the border” where group boundaries are identified, negotiated, and reinforced was heavily informed by the scholarship of Américo paredes, whose ethnographic work on the texas borderlands shed light on “the generative power of borders and other contact zones”

“the internet is both a space where social and cultural boundaries continue to separate “us” from “them” and a contact zone where different groups come together (Abrahams and bauman 1981:5).”