The Lowcountry and surrounding South Carolina’s sea islands have evolved, hosting different groups of people pushing and pulling on one another’s cultures in various ways. Charleston, South Carolina, is home to the historic slave trade and ongoing race and socioeconomic class dynamics stemming from this time.

The Gullah, descendants of West Africans enslaved in the Lowcountry and surrounding sea islands of coastal South Carolina, have built an insulated people and culture through generational land ownership and African traditions. Over time, this has been met with gentrification threatening the Gullah peoples’ identity and preservation of their culture. Simultaneously, Gullah culture has shaped Charleston’s coastal region, South Carolina. We can look at Gullah cuisine as a marker of how their people have preserved their culture, influenced the area around them, and resisted hegemonic gentrification. My goal is to answer a question: how has Gullah food symbolized the preservation of Gullah culture amid dominant hegemonic culture? First, it’s important to look at the distinct cultural and geographical landscape of the Gullah.

The insulation of the Gullah in South Carolina has allowed their people to preserve their West African roots while also forming a new collective identity through music, language, and food in particular. The rhetoric of ‘insulated’ culture here is intentional – in “A Clash of Cultures” by Elizabeth Brabec and Sharon Richardson, they state that the clashing of “landowner and slave” cultures “provided the environment of a distinct cultural group” from the social isolation of the forced Gullah settlements away from the landowners and the rest of the South (2007, 151).

The Gullah were removed from their West African homeland and placed in an unfamiliar environment and geography within coastal southeastern America. Therefore, the Gullah were forced to cultivate the land with the resources they had to both satiate themselves and their families while finding cultural sustenance through the resources of the Lowcountry and surrounding sea islands. The Gullah’s relatively unique social position in relation to the landowners was possible in that their slave labour was organized under what is called the “task system” in which – and census reports indicate that – the ‘masters’ were rarely physically present, resulting in a high degree of autonomy allowing the Gullah to develop “an increased sense of ownership in the plantation itself, and a connection to the land not seen in other regions” (Brabec, Richardson 2007, 153).

Henceforth, the Gullah adopted a growing “mistrust of government” reinforced by their oral land acquisition agreements called ‘heirs’ property’ rather than official documents (Brabec, Richardson, 2007, 153). The Gullah culture itself represents what is uniquely American: a ‘melting pot’ of different cultures in resistance to a homogenous majority. Specifically, the Gullah are regarded as a “creolization of African, Native American, and European influences into a distinctly new and different American culture” (Brabec, Richardson 2007; 152, 157). The difference between the culture of the Gullah and that of colonial America, though, is that the Gullah were forced upon their land outside of their own will. Yet, they have endured and have shown resilience despite hegemonic influences. Seeing the Gullah culture as a form of resistance and growth connotes that their language, music, and food symbolize and embody these markers.

Rice in Gullah culture also acts as a medium for cultural transmission and remembrance amid dominant powers in the Lowcountry. In “We Got Our Way of Cooking Things,” Beoku Betts illustrates the deep history of rice in The South. Africans were captured from various regions and brought to the coastal Southeast between 1670 and 1800; with rice being a lucrative crop in South Carolina and Georgia during this period, the rice-cultivating regions of West Africa became a particular target for enslavers (Beoku-Betts 1995, 539).

Africans were forced from the “Rice Coast” of West Africa and onto plantations surrounding Charleston because “the planters themselves lacked knowledge about rice cultivation in tropical conditions” (Beoku-Betts 1995, 539). The influx of Africans from the Rice Coast then provided the coastal regions of South Carolina with an entirely new system of rice cultivation and a set of technical knowledge. (Beoku-Betts 1995, 539) Rice represents the extent to which, against their own will, the Gullah transformed the economic and cultural landscape of the South. Today, rice remains central to the Gullah people’s own culture.

Songs, stories, and dances surrounding rice shows that the food acts as a medium for intergenerational culture transmission – traditions are passed down through this food and what it represents to the Gullah people. Retaining the vitality of Gullah culture occurs in resistance to the area’s dominant culture as well. The resistance is multilayered in that stories surrounding rice from women passed down through generations represent a counter to the dominating White culture of the coastal South and dominant male culture.

To this point, Beoku-Betts comments on narratives from Gullah women describing the significance of rice to them: “It is also significant that women narrate these recollections because through such stories we learn how marginalized cultural groups construct a familiar and identifiable world for themselves in a cultural setting” (1995, b544). The Gullah centre rice to create this world in resistance to the dominant culture. In discussing ‘cultural vitality’ and the transmission of culture through generations in the face of another dominant culture, it is also important to mention how memory plays a role in the dynamic. Beoku-Betts references another study saying, “identity is often constructed through a people’s ability to discover who they are through memory” (1995, 544). Therefore, food and rice, in particular, act as a vehicle for Gullah culture to stay alive through generations and as a means for remembering who they are.

In discussing the Gullah’s place in the Coastal South, it is important to emphasize their cultural vitality and resilience as people. The Gullah are living out their lives both in rural and urban areas surrounding Charleston and all over the world. However, those in the Lowcountry and urban areas surrounding Charleston are in a natural place of resistance to the dominant culture as they hold onto theirs. For a millennial in downtown Charleston or the retired couple on Hilton Head Island (historically Gullah land), everyday culture is often lived out through either mythical representation of the Gullah or ignorance of their importance to the region altogether. For the Gullah, generational practices of land ownership and the processes of food that come from it are still highly important. We are still having this conversation which means that Gullah culture lives on through many forms – and that Gullah people still value the retainment of their identity as a people. That research is still being done to show that Gullah’s struggle for cultural retainment is important. It illuminates the Gullah’s cultural vitality, through food especially, despite every threat to transform, romanticize, or erase it.

References:

Brabec, & Richardson, S. (2007). A Clash of Cultures: The Landscape of the Sea Island Gullah. Landscape Journal. 26(1): 151-167.

Josephine A. Beoku-Betts. (1995). We Got Our Way of Cooking Things: Women, Food, and Preservation of Cultural Identity among the Gullah. Gender & Society. 9(5): 535-555.

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Keegan Sweeney is a second-year student at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, MI (USA), studying Anthropology/Sociology to supplement her journalism work. He has been published in Kalamazoo College’s literary magazine, The Cauldron, and a newspaper serving the west side of Jackson County, Michigan, called the County Press.