Food and the autobiographical self in Harry Crews'A Childhood
The Biography of a Place
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5283952 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Shelley Ingram (University of Louisiana at Lafayette, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue | 1-2 |
| Pages | 30-47 |
| Publication date | 2016-04-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Food and Foodways (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0740-9710 • E-ISSN: 1542-3484 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/07409710.2016.1142778 |
| OpenAlex | W2393425675 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 21 |
The food memories recounted by Harry Crew in A Childhood: The Biography of a Place situate A Childhood as a memorial reconstruction of a material identity, as an autobiography that treats the body, the senses, and the social world as inextricable from life writing. Looking critically at food memories in A Childhood reveals the densely layered and deeply entrenched role that food plays in the building of Crews’ intersectional and relational identity, an identity tied to race, class, and community. This goes against what was once a common critical trope in autobiographical studies, that the autobiographical narratives of white male writers were essentially concerned with the reassembling of an autonomous self rising above its cultural and social environs. Using anthropological and sociological theories of food, ritual, and memory, this essay argues that the food and foodways embedded within all levels of Crews’ memory offer a clear challenge to traditional modes of reading autobiography and provide insight into the inextricability of food, memory, and the narrated relational self
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Autobiographical memory · Biography · Childhood memory · Collective memory · Episodic memory · Foodways · Identity (music) · Linguistics · Literature · Masculinity · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process) · Recall · Self · Sociology · Trope (literature) · White (mutation) · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
Ethnic and regional foodways in the United States
Reading autobiography
Purity and Danger
How Societies Remember
Episodic Memory
How Our Lives Become Stories
After Southern Modernism
Embodied Cognition, Representationalism, and Mechanism
Biographical truths and their clinical consequences
Purity and Danger
Food and culture
The 'Possum in Midwestern Folklore
Food Choice, Symbolism, and Identity
Food Gifts
Ritual
Remembrance of Repasts
Social memory and ritual performance
Food and Memory
The Anthropology of Food and Eating
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,67 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2025 (3) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |