Author(s):
1. Saiqa Siddiq Khan:
Gomal University, D. I. Khan, Pakistan
Abstract:
Drawing on Michelle T. King's notion of “culinary nationalism” and Anita Mannur's conceptualization of “culinary nostalgia” I intend to explore that how the characters in the selected narratives-Shelina Zahra Jan mohamed's Love in a Headscarf: Muslim women Seeking One and Jhumpa Lahiri's Name sake present culinary nationalism as a process of creation and contestation and show how food takes on a nostalgic significance in diaspora. Cuisine and nation intersect all over the world, but nowhere, arguably, with as much depth and intensity as in diaspora. The impetus in this article is to interrogate how the selected narratives involve culinary practices in the definition, preservation, transformation, dismantling, and even imagining national identities. Food becomes both intellectual and emotional anchor for the immigrants physically transporting them to their geographically and temporally distant childhood home and giving them a sense of rootedness in diaspora. The desire to remember home by fondly re-creating culinary memories cannot be understood merely as a reflectively nostalgic gesture; rather such commemorative acts must be read as a commentary on what it means to inhabit different diasporic locations while constantly battling the implications of routing memory and nostalgia through one's relationship to culinary practices. The selected narratives show the increasing importance of culinary narratives in contemporary postcolonial discourse.
Page(s):
106-106
DOI:
DOI not available
Published:
Journal: International Food & Nutrition Conference" August 18th-20th, 2022, University of Swat, Swat (Book of Abstracts), Volume: 1, Issue: 1, Year: 2022
Keywords:
Pakistan
,
Culinary Narratives
,
Nationalism
,
Nostalgia
References:
References are not available for this document.
Citations
Citations are not available for this document.