The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins

Bibliographic Data

ID13100723
AuthorsLisa Jordan Powell (0000-0003-1171-6867, University of the Fraser Valley, corresponding author), Elizabeth S D Engelhardt (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Year2015
Volume1
Issue2
Pages414-432
Publication date2015-07-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeoHumanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2373-5678 • E-ISSN: 2373-566X
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/2373566x.2015.1099421
OpenAlexW2281939471
LanguageEN
References cited44

This article examines the symbolic whiteness associated with pumpkins in the contemporary United States. Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte, a widely circulated essay in McSweeney’s on “Decorative Gourd Season,” pumpkins in aspirational lifestyle magazines, and the reality television show Punkin Chunkin provide entry points into whiteness–pumpkin connections. Such analysis illuminates how class, gender, place, and especially race are employed in popular media and marketing of food and flavor; it suggests complicated interplay among food, leisure, labor, nostalgia, and race. Pumpkins in popular culture also reveal contemporary racial and class coding of rural versus urban places. Accumulation of critical, relational, and contextual analyses, including things seemingly as innocuous as pumpkins, points the way to a food studies of humanities and geography. When considered vis-à-vis violence and activism that incorporated pumpkins, these analyses point toward the perils of equating pumpkins and whiteness

Advertising · Aesthetics · Art · Race (biology · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Gender Studies · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy