Caribbean Food and Storytelling: A Journey
Sarah Lawson Welsh

• Saturday 10 June 2017, 1.30PM to 3.30pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
  Book tickets
• HG/103, Holgate Building, York St John University (view map)
• Wheelchair accessible

Event details

We’re used to saying: ‘We are what we eat’ but what about ‘We are how we cook and talk about food’? Sarah Lawson Welsh, expert on Caribbean food and writing, explores how the use of a simple iron pot or ‘duchy’, originally introduced by the Dutch for use on slave ships and used by African slave populations in the Caribbean, gave rise to a richly varied culinary and oral storytelling tradition.

Heavy black cast-iron pots, cauldrons and skillets are a mainstay of African-derived cuisines across the globe, producing meals as diverse as Brazilian Acaraje, Nigerian Accra Fun Fun, Caribbean Pepperpot and African American Soul Food such as fried chicken, cornbread and collard greens; similarly the flat skillet-like tawa, used for making roti, is a mainstay of Indian foodways in the Caribbean.

Sarah will explore how from the very beginning, food and words, cooking and storytelling were intimately linked. She’ll show how Caribbean cooks and writers developed a unique philosophy of life which saw them through times of famine, feeding, feasting and fasting and which enabled them to define and re-affirm different cultural, ethnic, caste, class and gender identities by writing about what, when and how they cooked and ate.

About the speaker

Dr Sarah Lawson Welsh gained a PhD in Caribbean Studies (Language and Literature) from the Centre for Caribbean Studies, Warwick University. She has taught at the Universities of Hull, Warwick, Northampton and York St John and is currently Reader and Associate Professor in English and Postcolonial Literatures at York St John.

Her current research is centred on food, literature and culture in the Caribbean and Britain. She is presently writing a book called Food, Text and Culture in the Caribbean for Rowman and Littlefield (2018). A chapter called 'Caribbean Cravings: Food in Caribbean Writing' will appear in the new Routledge Companion to Food and Literature (2017) edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brien.

Her monograph on Guyanese/ Black British writer, Grace Nichols, was published in the British Council 'Writers and their Work' series in 2007. The co-edited collection, Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for a New Millennium was published by Routledge in 2010 and the co-edited The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature was first published in 1996. She is a founding member and Associate Editor of the international Journal of Postcolonial Writing (formerly World Literature Written in English), published six times a year by Taylor and Francis. For more information on Sarah’s research please see yorksj.academia.edu/DrSarahLawsonWelsh