Culinary Narratology in Everyday Life: The Foodways and Identity Formations of South Asian Women Immigrants in Jhumpa Lahiri's "Mrs. Sen's" and The Namesake

Hsin-Ju Kuo

《小說與戲劇》 20卷2期 (2011/01) Pp. 1-37

並列摘要

Understood as cultural practices that display a set of behaviors, emotions and thoughts in specific socio-cultural contexts, foodways and culinary activities are considered practices of the self and constructions of identities. For South Asian women immigrants, food and cookery become an important metaphor for the continuity of identity in diaspora and cultural retention that designate their migrant bodies as a site for self-articulation of nostalgia, resistance and negotiable identity formation in the host country. This paper elaborates the indivisible correlations between women immigrants' gendered bodies, identity re-formation and foodways in Jhumpa Lahiri's ”Mrs. Sen's” and The Namesake. It focuses on how culinary narratives illuminate larger cultural questions about racial women bodies and gender issues in diaspora. As Arjun Appadurai indicates, women immigrants' perceptions of foodways actually represent a relatively complicated process, involving a dynamic ”gastro-political” network to problematize issues of identity in displacement and cultural practices in terms of gender. In the first section of this paper, I investigate the theoretical discussions of the entangled relationship between women immigrants' identity re-formation and culinary praxis in the transnational context. Secondly, I examine women immigrants' traumatic experience of disassociation engendered by the process of emigration and cultural displacement. For them, the ritualized culinary praxis acts as a ”technology of the self” in everyday life, narrating the lives of subjugated and marginalized female subjects in diaspora. In the third section, I argue that culinary praxis have subversively produced a significant and sanctioned cultural space that not only cultivates the force of performative resistance and negotiation, but also fosters the women immigrants' actualization of agency.

並列關鍵字

Jhumpa Lahiri ； Mrs. Sen's ； The Namesake ； culinary practice ； performative resistance ； technology of the self

參考文獻

Appadurai, Arjun(1981).Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia.American Ethnologist.8,494-511.

Avakian, Arlene Voski(ed.)(2005).Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking.New York:Berg.

Banerji, Chitrita(2001).The Bengali Bonti.Gastronomica.1(2),23-26.

Joseph, Suad(Ed.)(2006).Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures.Leiden:Koninklijke Brill NV.

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