Professors Gordon K. Mantler and Caroline J. Smith published their latest books this spring.
Mantler’s “The Multiracial Promise: Harold Washington’s Chicago and the Democratic Struggle in Reagan’s America” (University of North Carolina Press) revisits the election of Harold Washington as the first Black mayor of Chicago forty years ago. Washington’s electoral victories not only established the charismatic Black politician as a folk hero, but also underscored the great potential for the era’s progressive, mostly Democratic urban politics when Ronald Reagan and other conservatives appeared resurgent. Yet what could be called the Washington era revealed limits to electoral politics, too, especially when decoupled from neighborhood-based grassroots organizing – the kind that elected him in the first place.
In “Season to Taste: Rewriting Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women’s Food Memoirs” (University of Mississippi Press), Smith explores women’s food memoirs with recipes to consider the ways in which these women rewrite this kitchen space and renegotiate their relationships with food. The space of the kitchen, and the expectations of women associated with it, have shifted considerably since the 1960s – from one of imprisonment, often informed by the second-wave feminist movement, to a place of transformation. Memoirs and recipes of the time reinterpret their roles within the private sphere of the home as well as the public sphere of the world of publishing, exploding the divide of private/feminine and public/masculine in both content and form and complicate the genres of recipe writing, diary writing, and memoir.
The program plans to hold a small celebration of these accomplishments in the fall.