Rafia Zafar

Rafia Zafar

Professor Emerita of English and African & African American Studies
PhD, Harvard University
research interests:
  • American Literature Before 1935
  • 19th Century African-American Literature
  • Harlem Renaissance Literature
  • Food Ways and US Literature

contact info:

office hours:

  • Fridays 1:30-3:30PM, and by appointment

mailing address:

  • Washington University

    CB 1122

    One Brookings Drive

    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

​Professor Zafar writes about the intersection of food, authorship, and American identities, nineteenth century Black writers, and the Harlem Renaissance. She is the Ford Foundation Fellowship Programs regional liaison for Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

Zafar began her career at Washington University in St. Louis as Director of the Program in African & African American Studies; she has also directed Undergraduate Honors in the Department of English. Currently she is the Ford Foundation Fellowship Programs regional liaison for Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma.  Zafar’s publications include God Made Man, Man Made the Slave (co-editor; Mercer 1990); Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl  (co-editor; Cambridge UP, 1996); We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870 (Columbia UP, 1997); and Harlem Renaissance Novels: The Library of America Collection (two volumes; Library of America, 2011).  Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning appeared in March 2019 (Southern Foodways Alliance Series/University of Georgia Press). Zafar has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Virginia Center for the Humanities; in 2007 she held the Walt Whitman Distinguished Fulbright Chair at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. In 2014-2015 she was the National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.  Professor Zafar was recently interviewed by Sauce Magazine.

Selected articles

Cooking for civil rights

The birth of African American writing

James Baldwin: Some degrees of separation

Frederick Douglass and George Teamoh: Anxieties of influence in the postbellum slave narrative

Carver's Food Movement: How the famous botanist paved the way for today's "sustainable agriculture"

Selected Courses

  • English:  Passing: Identities Lost and Found
  • English:  Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows Seminar
  • English:  African American Literature:  Key Authors, Critical Contexts (graduate seminar)
  • AFAS:  Recipes for Respect:  Black Foodways in the United States
  • AFAS:  Rebels, Sheroes and Race Men:  19th century African American Intellectual Activism
  • English/AFAS:  Slavery and the Literary Imagination
  • English/AFAS/JINES:  Blacks and Jews in American Literature
  • English/AFAS:  Zora Neale Hurston
  • English:  Race and Ethnicity in American Literature
  • English/AFAS:  The Harlem Renaissance 
  • English/AmCS: Food in American literature and culture

in the news:

Recipe for Respect

Rafia Zafar guest edits African American Review’s special issue on Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

Rafia Zafar partners with St. Louis Metro Market's "Food Bus" on Community Cookbook Project

Cooking for civil rights

Back to Ampersand
Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning

Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning

Rafia Zafar

Food studies, once trendy, has settled into the public arena. In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. Recipes for Respect bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing nearly to the present day, African Americans have often been stereotyped as illiterate kitchen geniuses. Rafia Zafar addresses this error, highlighting the long history of accomplished African Americans within our culinary traditions, as well as the literary and entrepreneurial strategies for civil rights and respectability woven into the written records of dining, cooking, and serving. Whether revealed in cookbooks or fiction, memoirs or hotel-keeping manuals, agricultural extension bulletins or library collections, foodways knowledge sustained Black strategies for self-reliance and dignity, the preservation of historical memory, and civil rights and social mobility. If, to follow Mary Douglas’s dictum, food is a field of action—that is, a venue for social intimacy, exchange, or aggression—African American writing about foodways constitutes an underappreciated critique of the racialized social and intellectual spaces of the United States.