The stories and teachings of Gullah Geechee culture won’t just be told but also tasted during a day filled with learning.
Coastal Carolina University will hold the first International Gullah Geechee and African Diaspora Research Symposium in the Allen Ballroom, located in the Singleton Building from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesday. Registering for the event is required, costing $20 for students and $50 for community members.
In collaboration with The Athenaeum Press, the inaugural research symposium will focus on Gullah Foodways, featuring the Mellon Foundation-supported project “Cock Hunnah Yeez and Nyam Up de Good Bittles,” which translates to “Listen with Intention and Eat the Good Food.”
The event is hosted by the Joyner Institute for Gullah and African Diaspora Studies. According to CCU’s official website, the Joyner Institute’s mission is dedicated to critically understanding the experiences of Gullah Geechee people and other descendants within the global African Diaspora. Gullah Geechee people were born from the descendants of West African slaves brought to the south eastern coast, especially in the coastal Lowcountry.
Zenobia Harper, the director of the Joyner Institute, believes food connects us all through shared history and experience. She hopes the research symposium will connect people of Gullah Geechee culture, CCU students, faculty and the Conway community.
“Food is actually the vehicle that helps us to move students through the Gullah Geechee culture,” Harper said. “I think that food is a more connecting and more binding topic to coalesce around.”
For example, Harper described rice as a connector.
“From seafood to fish, with rice being that connection. And so, since rice as a grain feeds the majority of the world, it’s kind of easier to connect, and tastier too,” Harper said. “I mean, you can get young people to listen and be interested if their palette is being fed.”
Members of the Joyner Institute explained how all people in American culture are blended by the food created and shared. Several popular dishes in the present day started off as survival meals in slavery and traveled with African American people wherever they went as a source of connection and community.
“We are nothing but a melting pot in America,” Harper said. “And so, the Gullah Geechee Community Day festivals and festivals like it give the opportunity to teach, to learn, to expose, to envelop people in the culture, regardless of what’s going on in the outside.”
Tabitha Lowery, a co-associate director of the Joyner Institute and assistant professor of African American literature, hopes to further educate her students and research attendees about the origins behind Gullah, African foods and recipes, as well as what we can learn from them.
Lowery specifically spoke about her previous experience educating her Critical Conversations: Print and Identity students about Gullah Geechee food and history.
“My module specifically focused on the ways that we can find the silences in the archives and what those silences might do for us in terms of learning from them,” Lowery said. “There might be recipes that are definitely from Gullah and African peoples that are in books that are not by African or Gullah people. So, learning about how these foods carry memories and carry cultural knowledge will help people identify.”
Also a co-associate director of the Joyner Institute and a visual arts assistant professor, Ashlyn Pope stated the event will hold speakers from CCU faculty and students, namely students who have taken courses where they have gotten to learn about Gullah Geechee and African culture. The event will grant students an opportunity to present their hard work in front of fellow academia and possible employers.
“It’s a little different in that we’re focusing with the research symposium on campus more. So it’s focused more on students than it is on the international people coming in as well.”
