Food origin stories
The test kitchen of Afro-Asia Group (est. 2019), Kitchen Marronage (est. 2021) is an intellectual community for those interested in what Prof. Goffe describes as the “gastropoetics of Afro-Asia after the plantation.” Directed by Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe, Kitchen Marronage focuses on plantation foodways. In partnership with the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in New York, collaborators will explore the kitchen as a site of resistance and cross-racial co-production. Cooking demonstrations, co-sponsored with cultural heritage museums, and other recorded events will form an open-access video archive. Kitchen Marronage is generously sponsored with financial support from the Mellon Foundation.
What is Marronage?
n. marronage, maroonage, cimmaronaje,
defining marronage must encompass the fact that it is an ongoing act of resistance
the process of extricating oneself from slavery. Relating to groups of runaway slaves who became 'Maroons' in the swamps of the southern states of the USA and across the Western Hemisphere during the period of transatlantic slavery. Africans in America, who escaped enslavement and lived as part of a hidden community near or far from the plantation.
petit
a strategy of resistance in which individuals or small groups, for a variety of reasons, escaped their plantations for a short period of days or weeks and then returned.
grand
refers to people who removed themselves from their plantations permanently. Grand marronage could be carried out by individuals or small groups, or it could be the result of plantation-wide breakouts, or even colony-wide rebellions.
We are influenced and inspired in our ethics and code of relation by the model of the fractal that adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. In addition we draw inspiration from Indigenous feminist labs such as CLEAR Lab directed by Max Liboiron and Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab directed by Eve Tuck.
