Culinary Narratology in Everyday Life: Foodways and Identity ...

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Culinary Narratology 13 situation of emigration, for both states indicate a ceaseless process of rift, alienation and othering. Thus, catalyzed by craving for Bengali food, Ashima’s body has become a contested site within which she is “betwixt and between,” in a state that may be called a liminal period or threshold time when great change is possible. Her state of being diasporic and being pregnant engender, in many ways, the transitional quality of the body, in which the body’s physical boundaries in diaspora are ceaselessly changing. Both characters Mrs. Sen and Ashima initially suffer from drifting among a disassociated and dispossessed life due to cultural displacement. This experience of alienation and estrangement seems to be unavoidable for immigrant women. However, to survive themselves in this diasporic life, both characters develop their own way of coping with the difficulties in an adopted society. In the next part, I will elucidate how they both utilize culinary practices as means of resistance as well as ways of creating a more productive perspective in diasporic life. Women Immigrants’ Culinary Practices as Bodily Technique of Self-Articulation in Everyday Life Foods, foodways, culinary praxis and their gendered inflections in South Asian immigrant women’s diasporic life are an important element in “Mrs. Sen’s” and The Namesake. In the cases of Mrs. Sen and Ashima, their cookery has become a bodily performative act to articulate their emotions and perceptions of their diapsoric life. Judith Butler defines “performative act” as a reiterated doing, “not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed,” but rather an act that creates the subject (25). To borrow this notion of the performative dimension of everyday life, Mrs. Sen and Ashima’s subjectivity as marginalized South Asian immigrant women is partly constituted by their continual acts of Indian cultural praxis, including their culinary practices. To argue that culinary practices are performative acts is to acknowledge the representative as well as the material qualities of
Culinary Narratology 14 food. In analyzing ethnic culinary praxis, Herbert Gans postulates the elaborate relationship between immigrant foodways, ethnicity and identity formation as “expressive” and “symbolic” (436). According to his argument, in consuming particular kinds of ethnic foods, immigrants are able to immerse themselves in connecting to their cultural traditions without being forced to incorporate themselves into their everyday behavior. However, Anita Mannur has the opposite view, arguing that immigrants’ desire to consume certain ethnic foods actually represents how they deliberately intend to racialize themselves in particular and powerful ways (58). Thus, eating can serve as a performative act for immigrants as well as an important site of resistance. Reading culinary practices as a performative act of resistance relies not only on the symbolic, but also the material qualities of food, as well as the ways food represents and performs the solidity and materiality of the body. The association between what a person eats and identifies with is always reiterated and reconstructed by daily quotidian acts. Therefore, through the act of consuming particular foods, bodies can become social beings that literally embody certain kinds of consciousness, such as a sense of nationality or ethnicity. In analyzing the interactions between foodways and ethnic identity formations, Jennifer Ho argues that food serves as a significant medium for compliance with and resistance to Americanization (3). Cooking, eating, and choices of ingredients consequently become explicitly political acts of resistance in demarcating boundaries of either inclusion or exclusion and affirmation or negation within an imaginatively constructed home in diasporic lives. For the female immigrants in Lahiri’s works, culinary practices may be considered as routes toward the racialization of their characters into gender and class conventions. In addition, food and eating also reveal what is imagined as linguistically impossible, gesturing towards what is outside social discourse and forms of embodied knowledge that lurk at the limits of textual possibility. In Mrs. Sen’s case, as she is silenced by her husband and the normalizing influence of American society, the only way she can express herself is through
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