The culinary space reading food and identity intersections in select narratives

Abstract

This study focuses on select fictional narratives with food mentions at the peripheries to enquire into the textualisation of food that exhibits the existence of an enunciative culinary newlinespace wherein the nuances of individual and collective identities are negotiated. The culinary space is conceptualised by considering the defined and built physical space wherein activities associated with the culinary realm occur and the imaginative space created through the presence and absence of food. This culinary space interacts with mobility, which serves as the newlinelinking idea that ties together Anita Nair s Ladies Coupé (2001), Bharti Kirchner s newlineDarjeeling (2002), Monica Ali s Brick Lane (2003), Kunzang Choden s The Circle of Karma newline(2005), and Manjushree Thapa s Seasons of Flight (2010), and informs these specific newlinetextualisations of food and prompts the need to focus on the representations of everyday lived experiences. This study reads the chosen narratives to enable a reading that is distinct from the conventional one of culinary narratives centred on food and establishes that the textualisation of food in narratives with food at the peripheries is an important site of investigation. This close reading through an approach directed by concepts from food studies and select notions from space and mobility looks into how the culinary space serves as the site of defining and re-imagining of individual and cultural identities of the characters through memories of food and relations to and through food. These insights add to the existing discourses on identity by looking into the textualisation of food shaped by notions of newlinespace and mobility to show that the transformative quality of food is reflected in the dynamism of the culinary space that endorses the same in the negotiation of identities that are explored, perceived, and projected within.