Food, Diaspora, and Memory

Subjects: Social Science, Cultural, Cooking, History
Imprint: Lever Press
Ebook : 9781643151229, 400 pages, 14 B&W images, 6 x 9, April 2027
Paperback : 9781643151212, 400 pages, 14 B&W images, 6 x 9, April 2027
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How food preserves memory, shapes identity, and sustains community across diaspora

Table of contents

Three Poems, Danielle Legros Georges  

Introduction

Arrivals 

Food as Nourishment and Nostalgia: Navigating New Homeland Identities in the Italian Diaspora from the Renaissance to the Present 

«Έφαγα τον κόσμο να σε βρω»/“I ate the whole world to find you”: food and intergenerational relationships in the diasporas of Greece, Cyprus, and Armenia

‘I Eat Therefore We Are!’: Food, Diasporic Nostalgia, and the Malayali Community

Sharing Meals and Memories in All-of-a-Kind Family 

Crossroads 

Meet Me Tonight at the Fine Chao Restaurant: Different Attitudes on Chinese Food within the Sino Diaspora  

Food for a Funeral: Matrilineal Foodways for Revisionary Daughters 

The “nostalgization” of health in Latinx cookbooks 

American Chinese Cuisine: Fusion, Infusion, or Confusion? 

Hybrid Creations: Connecting Generations and Nostalgic Reminiscence of Food in Madhur Jaffrey’s Writings 

Memory on the Market: South Asian Grocery Stores in London as a Space of Sensory Nostalgia and Contemplation of Diasporic Identity  

Departures 

Waiting, a short story

Between the trauma of socialism and fantasy of post-socialism: Jijia in northeastern China

Eating the Pain Away: Hunger, Trauma and Memory in Contemporary West Asian War Narratives 

Pinoy Cravings 

Futurities 

Hamburger Soup and the Frybread Wars: Food, Culture, and Digital Natives 

"Shall we have some for dinner?": Sexuality, Diaspora and Garlic in select poems of Sujata Bhatt 

Sumud and Food: How Cuisine Fuels Palestinian Resistance to Erasure

Culinary Memorialization and Diaspora: District Six Huis Kombuis 

Tempering Home Sp(i/a)ces: Exploring Indian Queer Diasporic Food Narratives 

Reflections on the Collection

Contributors 

Description

Across diasporic communities, food serves as a repository of memory, a marker of identity, and a powerful means of creating and sustaining belonging in the face of displacement. Food, Diaspora, and Memory brings together an international collection of contributors to explore how food mediates the complex relationships among migration, culture, family, and place. The essays explore how recipes, meals, culinary traditions, and food narratives function as living archives through which individuals and communities maintain connections to ancestral homelands while simultaneously creating new forms of belonging in their adopted homes. Together, the contributors reveal food as both a deeply personal and profoundly social medium through which diasporic communities navigate questions of identity, memory, and cultural negotiation. 

By bringing together global perspectives on food, diaspora, and cultural resilience, Food, Diaspora, and Memory offers a timely contribution to some of the most pressing social and cultural questions of our time and demonstrates the continuing power of food to sustain communities across borders, generations, and histories. 

Zoë Antoinette Eddy is an anthropologist, artist, and activist currently working as an Assistant Professor of Teaching at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She is also a counselor with a specialty in youth and adolescent counseling.