Scenes of Domestic Citizenship in Negro Home Demonstration Work 1921–1938

Reading two United States Department of Agriculture propaganda films, Helping the Negro Farmer (1921) and The Negro Farmer (1939) along with Maryland narrative reports, this article considers the evolution of state-sanctioned discourse around domestic science, race and diet. The films rely on themes that construct the Negro home as a foil to a whitewashed progressive domestic front. Tasked with reforming this home, Negro female home demonstration agents participated in these films and worked as interlocutors, selling the narrative of kitchens as workshops of patriotism and civility. Yet, they also negotiated a form of domestic citizenship, crafting tactics of early Black food sovereignty despite being underfunded. This important period of African American foodways urges us to consider how agents were both framed as expert and expendable in the production of a national domestic standard.