ARTS & CULTURE 12 & 13 | WOMEN IN STEM
14 & 15 | PHOTOSHOP EFFECTS
18 | PURIM
SELECTIONS FROM ARCHIVAL AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
Mammy: Unpacking anti-Blackness in Canadian food advertising history A spotlight on the history of the ‘mammy’ caricature as she appears in a Canadian advertising cookbook LAILA EL MUGAMMAR
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lack Heritage Month is an opportune time to spotlight archival material that contains evidence of a long history of anti-Blackness. Specifically, Canadian advertising cookbooks in the early 20th century offer unique insight into the role Blackness played in Canada’s imagined, or socially constructed, community. Advertisements featuring caricatures of Black people provide a timely reminder that hate is not the sole signifier of anti-Blackness. Sometimes it’s masked as endearment, as with the Crisco-wielding mammies of the Dear Old South whose lives were characterized by feeding white mouths. Other times, it is pity for the ‘starving African children’ that voluntourism (a form of tourism in which travelers participate in volunteer work, typically for a charity, according to World Vision) weaves into a mosaic of flies and distended bellies. The Black presence is a chalk outline on the tarmac of Canadian food history. We need only a keen eye to spot it. The Bliss Cook Book was published by Montreal-based Alonzo O. Bliss Medical Company in the early 20th century. The chapter “Old Fashioned Southern Preserves’’ is punctuated by the smiling face of a mammy, a Black nursemaid or nanny working and serving in a white household. She is canning jam in a checkered dress, and her scarf and head wrap mirror the garb in early renditions of Aunt Jemima, who Quaker Oats is now retiring as the figurehead of their pancake products. This image of a mammy romanticizes the roles enslaved Black women held. However, because the mammy was a cultural import from the United States, Canadians could participate in the perpetuation of this caricature without having to take accountability for it and thus maintain the illusion of a racism-free country. It was inherently anti-Black stereotypes such as the mam-
my that connected Canadians to the imagined community of Antebellum America. The mammy is not a misremembering of the past: she is a fabrication designed to placate white folk who were anxious about the new roles of the formerly enslaved. Worries about equal rights and miscegenation (reproduction between people of different races) disappeared when they reminisced about a Black figure who asked nothing of them. Black manumission (slaves being freed by their owners) and Black social mobility devastated Canada and America alike, leading some to seek reassurance that Black folk enjoyed back-breaking domestic labour. Historian Micki McElya challenges this falsehood with an anecdote in Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth Century America (2007): A woman identified only as “A Negro Nurse” described to a journalist oppressively long days and terrible wages as a live-in servant in an unnamed Southern city in 1912. She was allowed only one Sunday afternoon every two weeks with her children, who in turn were prohibited from visiting her at the home she worked and lived in. Except for those afternoons, she was on duty twenty-four hours a day. “It’s ‘Mammy, do this,’ or ‘Mammy, do that,’ or ‘Mammy, do the other,’ from my mistress all the time. So it is not strange to see ‘Mammy’ water-ing the lawn in front with the garden hose, sweeping the sidewalk, mopping the porch and halls, dusting around the house, helping the cook, or darning stockings … You might as well say that I’m on duty all the time—from sunrise to sunrise, every day in the week. I am the slave, body and soul, of this family. Black writers are under immense pressure to avoid discussing race issues that are perceived as unfixable, making historical anti-Blackness an unpopular topic; but we cannot erase the mam-
Old Fashioned Southern Preserves. Bliss Cook Book - Livre De Cuisine De Bliss (Alonzo O. Bliss Medical Co., circa 1910), A&SC, University of Guelph Library, TX715.6 ZZ921.
my from Canada’s past — nor should we want to. Going forward, we must give credence to those whose work disrupts the idea of Canada as a racism-free space, not just those who construct Canada as a safe haven.
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All of the texts mentioned here are available for viewing on the “What Canada Ate” website: whatcanadaate.lib.uoguelph.ca/, a digital repository of historic cookbooks from Archival & Special Collections’ Culinary Collection.
