Mardi 19 mars 2024 18h15 salle 126 Site Saint-Charles 1
Edible Domesticities: Authenticity Wars, Gender, Caste and Class in Twenty-First Century Indian Diasporic Food Writing and Media
Nandini Dhar (OP Jindal Global University, India)
For Indian diasporic writers, the culinary realm often assumes a distinct importance, since “Indian food” has become a highly visible commodity in Euro-American social life, through which, familiarity about “Indian culture” is created. Often, such visibility is attained through the institution of the “Indian restaurant,” which defines the dominant taste of what constitutes Indian food abroad. Noteworthy in this context is Indian actor, chef and writer Madhur Jaffrey’s comment that “top-quality” Indian food in New York or elsewhere cannot be found in any restaurants, but in “private Indian homes.” Such narratives -- repeated often by other cultural brokers in diaspora -- emphasizes the domestic interiors in a way that demands critical interrogations of the notions of “home” and “home-cooked Indian food” in Indian diasporic cultural productions. In this conversation, the emerging genre of the Indian diasporic food memoirs, cookbooks and cooking shows, come to play a significant role. Moving away from critical analyses of the immigrant novels, which often constitute the privileged genre of analysis in Indian diasporic and postcolonial studies, this presentation focuses on the popular culinary genres to argue, not only such authenticity wars are predicated upon narrative recreation of an uncritical nostalgia about the domestic gendered foodways, but also circulate and reinforce the cuisines of the upper-caste, upper/middle-class Indians as default “Indian food.” The presentation, then, concludes with an analysis of alternative archival-aesthetic efforts to document Dalit foodways, which problematize the default Indian diasporic efforts to erase the complex intersections of caste and class in diaspora through an emphasis on the “national.”
Nandini Dhar is Associate Professor of Literary and Gender Studies at OP Jindal Global University, India. Her research and teaching interests are informed by a sustained interest in how the intersections of the neoliberal and the postcolonial are enacted in the contemporary South Asian and diasporic literatures. She is the editor of Contemporary Gender Formations in India: In-Between Conformity, Dissent and Affect (Routledge, 2024).