We are seeking a replacement panelist for a panel on cosmopolitanism,
immigration, and food for the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference in
Urbana-Champaign, June 25-27. The panel has already been accepted and
tentatively includes Anita Mannur (Wesleyan University) as a respondent. The
conference keynote speakers this year include Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan
Morris. You can view the tentative schedule at:
http://www.crossroads2004.org/Schedule.html
We have included our original panel description and paper abstracts for the two
remaining presenters below. Please email queries and paper abstracts to Emily
Davis, edavis@umail.ucsb.edu, and Sumita Lall, sl1@umail.ucsb.edu, by March
21,2004.
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PANEL DESCRIPTION:
(Trans)Culinary Aesthetics: Interrogating the Consumption of Global Cuisine in
America. This panel examines various representations of food in popular,
religious, literary, and filmic texts in an attempt to explore, first, how
metropolitan audiences in the U.S. emerge as consumers of "other" cultures in a
transnational setting and, second, how immigrant communities in the U.S.
negotiate their places within or against this consumerist culture. Common to
all the papers is a concern with texts that express America's
nationally-inflected cosmopolitanism: the desire, in other words, to 'eat the
world at home.' The consumption and circulation of culinary imagery is of
particular interest to the panelists because food, as the most perishable of
commodities, is representative of the process by which American 'tastes' define
what is trendy across the 'globe,' indeed what bodies and nations are worthy of
global consumer interest in the new world order.
In her paper "From Ghetto Walls to Palatable Pleasures: The Invisible
Work of Domestic Mistresses in the Transformation of America," Sumita Lall
examines America's current obsession with "things Indian" and asks what role
the immigrant figure of the exotic temptress plays in manufacturing
cosmopolitan desires at home. "Home," especially in the writing of Bharati
Mukherjee and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, evokes both the private sphere of the
domestic family and the public sphere of the nation-state and its affairs;
however, what the immigrant experiences in her household and extended family
(i.e. community) as both Asian and American potentially collides with what is
nationally perceived as "other" or foreign. Positioning herself between
"homes," the temptress figure in both writers' works performs the role of
translator: she decides which aspects of her community's lived experience in
America can be most easily assimilated (i.e. most easily digested by consumers)
within national and international narratives of belonging. Mukherjee's
protagonist Jasmine, for example, celebrates her act of "subverting the taste
buds of Elsa County . . . [with] gobi aloo" (Jasmine 19) while condemning a
"certain kind of Punjab alive [in Queens]" (162) which she considers an
"artificially maintained Indianness" (145). References to Indian cuisine in
many South Asian-American texts are symbolic not only of the immigrant cultural
producer's awareness of her own ambivalence in appealing to a larger audience
but also of the immigrant's ambivalent position in the construction of national
narratives. The exotic temptress (or immigrant seductress) must appeal to
mainstream desires for escape and adventurism -- offering audiences, for
example, glimpses of a "store that smells of their desires" (Divakaruni
Mistress of Spices 7) -- while translating less palatable
aspects of her community's experience into innocuous forms of pleasure.
Emily Davis examines contemporary films and restaurant culture in her
paper "What's on the Menu? International Comfort Food," arguing that the
assimilation of immigrants in America involves the cultural embodiment of food,
while the consumption of 'international cuisine' by white Americans demands an
utter dissociation between food and embodied cultural history. In one of the
few serious scenes in the recent hit film My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the young
Toula Portokalos (Nia Vardalos) is shunned by her blonde-haired, blue-eyed
classmates for her homemade Greek lunch. This scene of the immigrant's 'weird'
or 'exotic' food as marker of cultural difference is also played out in
contemporary novels such as Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey, in which
the protagonist notes that the lovingly made lunches brought by Mexican men to
work in their paper bags and the duck brought home by the Chinese immigrant to
her family come to stand in for the many ways in which the immigrant is
perpetually and irrevocably foreign to the American 'mainstream,' or not in on
America. However, while so-called foreign comfort food marks immigrants as
other when prepared for family or offered for sale in the 'ethnic' restaurant,
the consumption of international cuisine allows white Americans to claim a
degree of metropolitan cultural capital. Restaurants such as The Standard in
Los Angeles market their fare as "international comfort food" to a hip young
white crowd. In this setting, the consumption of otherness is made comfortable
by its very dissociation from the embodied historical experience of racialized
subjects. Thus, while eating one's own culture reinforces the outsider status
of the immigrant subject, international comfort food, like liberal
multiculturalism, substitutes objects (food) for embodied cultural history and
demands the disappearance of the troubling, uncomfortable
immigrant body.
_______________________________________________________________________________
E m i l y D a v i s
Ph.D. Candidate, English Department
edavis@umail.ucsb.edu
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Full Information at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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