| Abstract | Southern food in the last ten years has become more than a regional food—it functions as lucrative brand and social movement. This article describes this transition using the methodology of performance studies, reading Southern food cookbooks as performative texts in order to trace the way that Southernness circulates both within the South and outside it. It then argues that this “new turn” in Southern cooking might be at the same time a nostalgic turn toward the past: a turn that underplays African-Americans’ labor’s role in creating and sustaining Southern food culture. How these erasures of the past butt up against New Southern food’s visions of the future is explored.
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