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

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Culinary Narratology 5 and their difficulties in assimilating and adapting to American society. The female protagonists in these works, Mrs. Sen and Ashima Ganguli, are depicted as characters dispossessed of their community bond in India and, in a sense, stripped of agency while joining their husbands in the US. Worse than their sense of being lost in adopting themselves to a new culture, their husbands cannot seem to understand their existential anxiety in the diasporic context. In their struggle to assimilate or negotiate hybridized spaces within which they can anchor their new identities and achieve a certain degree of self-agency in their diasporic life, these marginalized women’s insistence on the importance of culinary practices in everyday life is transformed into a cultural praxis in which resistance is embedded. We may thus ask why foodways and eating are particularly important in Lahiri’s portrayal of South Asian immigrants. How does this focus on culinary narratives illuminate larger cultural questions about racial bodies and gender issues in a diasporic context? To what extent do the foodways of Indian cuisine provide a language of self-conception and self-identity for these immigrant women? Moreover, why is it that culinary practices have become a sanctioned and important cultural space within which Lahiri’s first generation female immigrants can explore their anxieties about ethnic difference? 2 These questions highlight the specific focus of this paper – to consider the entangled relationships between identity formation and the politics of resistance as represented by culinary praxis in everyday life. In other words, culinary praxis here is metonymically interpreted as an extension of the body in a diasporic context, and thus turns the women immigrant bodies as sites of cultural struggle. Like other cultural carriers, such as names, festivals or clothing, food constitutes a vital part of immigrants’ sense of identity when they settle in a foreign country. Culinary authenticity acts as a cultural signifier of stableness and sense of belongingness inscribing itself indelibly on the female immigrant body. Mrs. Sen in “Mrs. Sen’s” and Ashima Ashoke in The Namesake explore the connections between
Culinary Narratology 6 re-formation of cultural identity and the immigrant bodies through the rituals of eating and culinary praxis in their everyday life in diaspora. In analyzing immigrant foodways, Mannur points out, the culinary narratives in the studies of race and gender associated with Asian immigrant experiences have become indispensible with regard to “how the depiction of ritualized everyday activities might be a window of understanding into the lives of colonized, subjugated, or otherwise marginalized subjects” (“Culinary Fictions” 57). Though encountering distress of nostalgia, both of Lahiri’s protagonists use culinary practices as either techniques of resistance or technologies of self to articulate their everyday perspectives towards identity formation in diasporic life. Mrs. Sen unwittingly enhances the racialization of her ethnic body by means of her obsession with authentic Bengali foodways. Meanwhile Ashima, by her gradual compromises between American and Indian cultures in everyday life, ultimately forms a negotiable identity in diaspora through the practice of her native foodways. In a way, both female protagonists articulate themselves by performing distinctive culinary practices, thus signifying female immigrants’ either defying or negotiating identity in diaspora through perspectives of everyday life. This paper aims at elaborating how the South Asian female immigrants utilize ethnic foodways, a dimension of bodily habitus in everyday life, to construct their own sense of racialized subjectivity, to mitigate their often difficult lives as female immigrants, and thus to generate a certain degree of agency in the diasporic context. Immigrant Women’s Alienated Bodies and Culinary Nostalgia in “Mrs. Sen’s” and The Namesake In most of Lahiri’s narratives, first generation South Asian female immigrants are portrayed as figures deprived of agency, because their move to the United States was simply a matter of accompanying their husbands. Different from the “much-touted highly educated, urbanized professional” South Asian male immigrants, who consider the West as a source of
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