Not Your Mother's Mammy

Walters, Tracey L.

doi:10.36019/9781978808614

2021

DOI: 10.36019/9781978808614

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Not Your Mother's Mammy

Tracey L. Walters¹

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Racialized and Gendered Constructions of the “Ideal Server”: Contesting Historical Occupational Discourses of Restaurant Service

Dempsey

2021

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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This essay takes a discourse-centered approach to understanding the historically contingent construction of restaurant service as a devalued occupational identity, showing how service is actively constructed as low wage and organized along hierarchies of gender, race, and class. These discursive constructions shape the relative visibility and legibility of workers as fully deserving of rights, compensation, and dignity. Building on prior research on the struggle over meanings of work, occupational identity, and gendered and racialized job segregation, the essay begins by tracing constructions of the “ideal server” predating the contemporary rise of restaurants from relations of servitude within and beyond the plantation economy, to the eventual entrenchment of tipping, and the gendered and feminized constructions of domestic service. It discusses racialized and gendered relations of servitude in the Pullman Company's dining cars and the eventual white feminization of waitressing. Adopting a historical narrative built on secondary literatures, it demonstrates the centrality of race, gender, and class to early occupational formations of service. It highlights how employers have cultivated occupational hierarchies and divisions as well as efforts by restaurant workers to transform how their labor is valued and compensated.

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Racialized and Gendered Constructions of the “Ideal Server”: Contesting Historical Occupational Discourses of Restaurant Service

Dempsey

2021

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow

Lastarria

2022

BTM

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“Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow” closely reads one novel and one play written in the early twenty-first century and set in the Jim Crow period. Analyzing how Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2005) and Lynn Nottage’s drama By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) take up Jim Crow era Black history together, I find that both works intentionally offer incomplete, subjective and fictive narrations of black life during Jim Crow to deny readers a sense of realism. In doing so, these authors represent a group of African American novelists and playwrights that contend with the decades following Black Arts Movement being so temporally removed from Jim Crow in two steps. Firstly, they acknowledge in their partial and obscure narratives that this historical Black experience cannot be fully recovered by treating Jim Crow Black history like a historical site to be discovered with a literary return. Secondly, they demonstrate in their direct appeal to their audiences to co-create the fictions’ narratives with the characters that black history can instead be a praxis of inter-generational, collaborative fiction writing that imagines past Black individuals, making them more transparent in the contemporary moment. These features of narrative and structural address signify that this group of post-Black Arts Movement authors consider Black individuals’ freedom during Jim Crow more accessible by conjecturing how it manifested with their audiences.

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Not Your Mother's Mammy

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Racialized and Gendered Constructions of the “Ideal Server”: Contesting Historical Occupational Discourses of Restaurant Service

Racialized and Gendered Constructions of the “Ideal Server”: Contesting Historical Occupational Discourses of Restaurant Service

Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow

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