Beyond the Kitchen: B. Smith (1949-2020) and the Legacy of Black Women's Cultural Work

FAIN: FZ-292612-23

Kimberly Denise Nettles-Barcelon
Regents of the University of California, Davis (Davis, CA 95618-6153)

Research and writing of a critical biography of model, restaurateur, author, and television host Barbara Elaine Smith (1950-2020), known as B. Smith.

This book project critically examines the long legacy of Black women’s work in the culinary and hospitality arts, as illustrated by the 40-year career of Barbara Elaine Smith (b1950-d2020), a model, restaurateur, lifestyle television host, cookbook author, and all-around style maven. Rather than a traditional biography, this book works to build a portrait of B. Smith’s public life as an influential Black woman in the food and lifestyle space from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. It does this by narrating through the archival gaps and the silences that often accompany the histories and voices of Black women in order to amplify and contextualize the significance of Black women’s cultural work (Hartman 2008, Moody-Turner 2017).