Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (American Literatures Initiative (Temple University Press))

274 Pages·2009·2.12 MB·English

by  Anita Mannur

Culinary Fictions

Culinary Fictions
Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture
anita mannur

Temple University Press
philadelphia
Temple University Press
1601 North Broad Street
Philadelphia, PA 19122
www.temple.edu/tempress
Copyright © 2010 by Temple University
All rights reserved
Pubilshed 2010
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Mannur, Anita.
Culinary fictions : food in South Asian diasporic culture / Anita Mannur.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4399-0077-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4399-0078-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Food in literature. 2. Food habits in literature. 3. South Asians in literature.
4. Cookery, Indic. 5. English literature—South Asian authors—History and criticism.
6. English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN56.F59M36 2009
820.9'3564—dc22
2009017460
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative
publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers
University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia
Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
For my family, and, in memory of Carmina Fugaban

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Food Matters 1
part one Nostalgia, Domesticity, and Gender
1 Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism,
and Diaspora 27
2 Feeding Desire: Food, Domesticity, and Challenges
to Heteropatriarchy 50
part two Palatable Multiculturalisms and Class Critique
3 Sugar and Spice: Sweetening the Taste of Alterity 81
4 Red Hot Chili Peppers: Visualizing Class Critique
and Female Labor 114
part three Theorizing Fusion in America
5 Eating America: Culture, Race, and Food in the Social
Imaginary of the Second Generation 147
6 Easy Exoticism: Culinary Performances of Indianness 181
Conclusion: Room for More: Multiculturalism’s
Culinary Legacies 217
Notes 227
Bibliography 235
Index 249

Acknowledgments
Growing up in various nodes of the South Asian diaspora, I came to
appreciate the intimate connections between food, gender, and ethnic-
ity through my mother’s efforts to teach me how to cook Indian food.
Disciplining me into becoming a good Indian woman by teaching me
how to cook was perhaps an extended exercise in futility. But as someone
who loved to eat and loved to cook, I rejected the idea that I needed to
learn how to make naan and chapattis and taught myself how to make
baguettes and bagels instead. I found a way to satisfy my mother’s wish
to see me cook while maintaining a critical distance from the notion that
I needed to cook Indian food in order to affirm my Indianness. After
becoming a college student in the United States, I learned to cook Indian
food with the help of my able instructor Madhur Jaffrey. Today if I eat
Indian food, it is not so much to remind me of India, a place where I
have never lived. Rather, Indian food is saliently connected with my vari-
ous homes in Malaysia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and the United
States.
Three generations of women in my family view food in radically
different ways. When my mother cooks, it is to feed loved ones and to
nourish our palates and bodies in the same ways she takes care of our
souls; when her mother cooked, it was a form of sustenance. My grand-
mother supplemented the family income by teaching cooking classes in
her home; and following the death of her husband (my grandfather), she
generated income by publishing two cookbooks in English and Kanna-
da, respectively. And when I cook it is certainly about feeding my friends