Cooking Up the Black Arts: Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s Kitchen Happenings

This article reviews Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s classic text Vibration Cooking beyond its initial use as a culinary handbook, reading deeply into its many references to improvisation and liberation. Through countless allusions to friends and colleagues in free jazz, Black Arts, and other crucial 1960s Black artistic and political circles, Smart-Grosvenor’s text uses recipes to both cover and convey the work of everyday liberationist praxis in the Black Arts Movement circles of which she was a crucial member. In this article, I review Smart-Grosvenor’s longstanding relationships with key musicians, activists, writers, and performers for whom improvisation across many modes engendered processes of Black liberation. For Smart-Grosvenor, the liberatory capacities of improvisation also existed in cooking, where ritual, inherited food cultures, ad hoc executions, and commensality worked together to create space for and feed a movement for Black freedom.