Affiliation:
1. Religion and Society, Drew University, Madison, NJ 07940, USA
Abstract
This article posits Georgia Gilmore and the “Club to Nowhere”—a crucial fundraising arm of the Montgomery Bus Boycott—as a critical vector in a larger tradition in the U.S. In Black movements for Black liberation, food and food production are engaged as a communal pedagogy for constructing agency, behavioral reform, economic power, resistance, and sustainable social transformation. While Montgomery preachers made speeches, activists strategized, and male leaders debated the place of women in the Black liberation project, Gilmore and her cadre of Black women domestics secured thousands of dollars to fund the movement by selling soul food staples. Through their labor, “The From Nowhere” transformed the socio-political and epistemological positionality of Black domestic women into a valuable intellectual resource for generating a movement for social change. Consequently, Gilmore reminds contemporary and future liberation theologians that interrogating and re-envisioning our epistemologies is essential to sustainable revolutionary social praxes. Working at the juncture of history, ethics, and critical theory, I look to Gilmore and “The Club from Nowhere” for historical reflection on the intersections of food, race, gender, and the future of liberation theologies.
Reference24 articles.
1. Butler, Philip (2021). Critical Black Futures: Speculative Theories and Explorations, Palgrave MacMillan.
2. Chappell, Marisa, Hutchinson, Jenny, and Ward, Brian (2018). Gender in the Civil Rights Movement, Rutledge.
3. Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought;Collins;Social Problems,1986
4. Day, Keri (2016). Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism: Womanist and Black Feminist Perspectives, Palgrave MacMillan.
5. Dixon, Vince (2020, March 30). Heaven Was A Place in Harlem. Eater.com. Available online: https://www.eater.com/a/father-divine.