Through Youtube Cooking Videos

Home , Eat Pray Love, Padma Lakshmi, Roti (wrap), Zapiekanka

REMEMBERING THE “HOME” THROUGH YOUTUBE COOKING VIDEOS:

SENSORY EVOCATIONS, CULTURAL NEGOTIATIONS AND THE DIASPORIC

KITCHEN

A Thesis submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences

TRENT UNIVERSITY

Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

English (Public Texts) M.A. Graduate Program

January 2014

Abstract

Remembering the “Home” through YouTube Cooking Videos: Sensory Evocations, Cultural Negotiations and the Diasporic Kitchen

Naveera Ahmed This thesis examines how food, culture and identity are linked to the idea of

“home.” Through a reading of oral narratives produced on the YouTube channel

“ShowMetheCurry,” I investigate how presenters Anuja and Hetal “write back” from a diasporic space in Texas, to the YouTube global public, and how food and cuisine, even in the age of globalization can be problematic in terms of representation of identities, work and space. I explore how the YouTube videos operate as a heterotopia, as what is presented to the audience in this medium is an embedding of spaces. The space that is projected through “ShowMetheCurry,” that of Anuja and Hetal’s own home kitchen, is then projected and viewed within the audiences’ own spaces, in various locations around the world. What connects these spaces is an interest in cooking, and a longing to satiate culinary nostalgia.

Keywords: discourse analysis, post-colonialism, food culture, YouTube, affect, identity,

South Asian diaspora, culinary nostalgia

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Dr. Suzanne Bailey, who has been an immense support and a constant voice of encouragement on this project. Her positive spirit has made the thesis writing process an enriching endeavor. It was an absolute pleasure working with Dr. Bailey. I would also like to thank Dr. Davina Bhandar and Dr. Charmaine Eddy for their thorough insights and suggestions. Professor Zailig Pollock, who served as the Director of the program in my first year at Trent, and who also taught one of the core courses which dealt with an understanding of the different types of texts, also deserves many thanks.

To my friend Janette Platana, who was a wonderful presence from almost the first day I have been at Trent, thank you, for indulging me in our very strange conversations and for your continuous support these past two years. Thanks to Andrea, Michelle, Stephanie, Leah and Latchmi for making Wallis Hall a warm place and making me feel less homesick.

And finally, I am indebted to my friends and family in Dhaka, for their phone calls and emails of encouragement and love. I am grateful to both my parents for their love and understanding, and especially to my mother, for the nurturing work she still continues to do, even from so far away.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Abstract ii

Acknowledgements iii

Table of Contents iv

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Food and the Solace of the Digital Domestic Home Space 32

Chapter Two: “In-betweenness” and the Many Homes of the Diasporic Subject 48

Chapter Three: YouTube as Heterotopia: Embedded Spaces and Subjectivities 69

Chapter Four: Culinary Work and Diasporic Domesticity 91

Chapter Five: The Racializion of Cuisine: Finding a Place for the ‘Ethnic’ 116

Conclusion 141

Works Cited 150

Introduction

Food tells stories. The kitchen and the dinner table act as settings, as does the context of the host country. Also parts of this grander setting are grocery stores that carry both familiar and foreign ingredients. These ingredients are elements in the art of many diasporic women who cook, where spices and colors “paint” and give food their tastes, and families their hybrid identities. The “invisible” work of shopping for ingredients, grinding spices, cooking meals, and the attempt to replicate the tastes of the past are all moments in the autobiographies of these women. These moments are often dismissed because they happen within the privacy of the kitchen. But these culinary acts are corporeal biographies, and the sites of the kitchen, the dinner table, and the private domesticities that encompass these spaces are where everyday lives are lived, when transitions happen and where identities are formed. Culinary traditions tell us how people live, what they long for and what they crave. “Home” can be conjured up through food, and tastes and fragrances have the power to transport and carry us over to a familiar time and a familiar place.

In my observation of my immigrant friends, everything that surrounds the whole act of cooking in the host country and the diasporic kitchen reveals stories about

“homemaking” and identity. YouTube is a rich source for this kind of material evidence of everyday existence. The particular channel I examine, “ShowMetheCurry,” by presenters Anuja Balasubramanian and Hetal Jannu, shows how the two women inhabit a diasporic domesticity and how the food they cook is a way for them to maintain a sensory link to their home of origin, India. Anuja and Hetal who broadcast recipes on their

YouTube channel “ShowMetheCurry” are of Indian heritage and the two women seem to

1 have migrated to the US later in their lives as adults.1 The personas they project on

YouTube tell us that they are mothers and wives. They promote their YouTube cooking channel through their website and Facebook page. What they have created is a commercial brand, and they have also used this digital space as a way to explore and maintain their connection to the past home, India. But the recipe stories reveal more about their longing for the tastes of their home of origin, and the way they attempt to retain this past within the present home in the host country.

In the limited scope of my thesis, I undertake a literary reading of individual

YouTube recipe videos on “ShowMetheCurry,” examining what recipes are shown, how these recipes are adapted in the context of the presenters’ host home in Texas and how these recipes are talked about, often reflecting a longing for the tastes and sensory elements of the home of origin. While this thesis will cross the interdisciplinary tracks of food studies, cultural studies and literary studies, and will explore through a literary lens, both YouTube videos and the significance of food in the diasporic home, this is not a socio-political study of the subjectivity of the presenters in the host home. It is instead, an analysis of the way YouTube is helping bridge a gap between the public and the private spheres, and how audiences on YouTube can make connections through food. I aim to document how food and the sharing of recipes can make permanent the transference of culinary knowledge and traditions through this new medium. I also aim to show how

1 They are described as being of “the Texas-based duo of Indian origin” in an article “Cooking up a South Asian Success Story” (2010). In the video “Show Me the Curry's Suji Halwa Dessert Recipe,” the two women reminisce about their childhood in India, where “sheera,” was among one of the dishes that was a part of their childhood.

Anuja and Hetal sometimes present India as “exotic,” re-circulating this idea that has been associated, by media representations, with the region of the Indian subcontinent.

In what follows, I use theoretical concepts related to home, space, exoticization and hybridity to explore how through these videos, Anuja and Hetal provide “references,” a starting point, for their imagined public to form communities online. I look at YouTube as a heterotopic space. As I will explain later, I read the space as “embedding” different notions of “home” and publics, and as a space merging reality and fantasy, to some extent. Because this project stems from my own experiences with food and how it is so pertinent to the creation of “home,” I read the videos as oral autobiographical narratives that archive the way Anuja and Hetal make their “homes.” I also think that these videos are important to write about and analyze, given that this new medium of YouTube, which is a collection of subjectivities and everyday “performances” that record moments of ordinary individuals in their everyday lives, reveals something about the way audiences, in the era of reality shows and participatory culture, are evolving. This material resonates with the YouTube audience’s voyeuristic appetite to “peek” into a stranger’s private domesticity. Similarly, I think this is an interesting subject of study in that individuals want to go on YouTube to produce “amateur” style videos that are wide ranging in their genres. Personal narratives on YouTube in the form of videos are texts that record everyday moments for individuals all over the world. What happens on YouTube, then, is that texts of various genres that range from home videos to “how-to” tutorials on topics such as cooking, make-up, gardening and home improvement, help to engage different audiences and performer personalities in and from different geo-locations. The videos are

3 texts around which online conversations take place and connect through their interests people from different corners of the world.

In the videos on “ShowMetheCurry,” I read stories of how the things that are familiar to Anuja and Hetal engage other viewers who are also interested in the type of

“subcontinental” cooking that the channel demonstrates. While my project is just a small

“transcription” of the way Anuja and Hetal record cooking as an activity for their audiences, I think that the material on YouTube from the various other channels also needs study and “reading” in similar ways. And again, I will remind readers of this thesis that this is an auto-ethnographic analysis, which entails a very subjective reading and interpretation on my part, about what I see as patterns of home and identity making in these videos. My own experience of being in a new cultural context has led me to be interested in how others who are far away from their homes evoke the familiar sensations of the “home,” especially through food. What also interests me is how food that is familiar to me is also considered to be “exotic” to others. This research stems from my own foray into the YouTube database of cooking videos, which I explored when I was first new to Canada and had to figure out how to cook for myself using ingredients and substitutions that are available in Canada. Not only did I find myself looking at Anuja and Hetal’s videos to explore how they made “culinary negotiations”, but I saw in their videos the fact that the two presenters were also expressing an “allegiance” to the culinary norms of India. This relationship between food, home and identity has led me to read YouTube cooking videos as texts. Through the presenters’ own articulations and the reactions from their audiences, as well as through other YouTube channels that deal with food from different culinary contexts, I argue that food and discussions around taste and

4 authenticity are very subjective and contentious. The degree of acceptable variations differs from person to person, and the way a cook interprets a dish may be deemed

“inauthentic” by some, as I demonstrate in my thesis with examples from user comments on some of Anuja and Hetal’s food videos.

The digital platform has changed the boundaries of the public and private, of ideas of homes and concepts of borderless communities. Videos that exist on the

YouTube sphere are texts in themselves, but what is also important as a site of scholarship is YouTube as a platform. YouTube helps to connect diasporic individuals across cultures and beyond borders, and to create a diasporic public where diasporic individuals from different corners of the world connect to each other over a shared need to remember the past home. YouTube then becomes an embedded space, in that it provides visual access to other diasporic domesticities and cooking, and also becomes a home in itself. When viewers spend significant periods of time every day browsing videos on YouTube, they inhabit an affective home on this digital platform. Their attention shifts to the time and place of the digital space. The space of the YouTube kitchen then becomes a place within the place of the audience’s own home. The YouTube sphere is a space where the viewer can indulge herself through videos and spend time in attempting to recreate the same feeling of re-living the past “home” in the present moment. This is an escape from the often alienating ideologies and representations of the

“foreign” immigrant present in the new home.

As I see in my friends in Toronto, the way they feel the need to connect to their original home is done through food, over meals and celebrations. In a context where everything is culturally different, cooking food from “home” is the way they attempt to

5 hold on to their culture. On Eid, my friends invite other Bengalis and Muslims from the

Indian subcontinent, in order to replicate a feeling. What my immigrant friends try to create is a feeling of familiarity and a feeling of being at home in the company of family and friends of the “past home.” This feeling is ephemeral and not quite the same, without the same people of the past home. But by cooking traditional Eid food, for example, and being among others who also celebrate this holiday, my friends feel more “at home,” as if

Eid exists in this foreign land, even if the holidays of the home left behind in the past have no such significance or acknowledgement in Canada.

By looking at Anuja and Hetal’s videos, I try to investigate their need to recreate

“home” in the host country. This is also a study of how “home” is created through the tastes, smells and memories connected to particular food. Food as a part of everyday life and a part of the way culture is brought to the host home plays an important part in the manifestation of the diasporic domestic space. Home, in its many definitions,2 referring to the diasporic individual’s home of origin, the sensory desire for that home left behind in the past, and of course, the domestic space and cultural context of the “host” country, can be compared to a multi-textured fabric that is under tension between longing and belonging. In “ShowMetheCurry,” Anuja and Hetal demonstrate how these recipe stories contain autobiographical components, including the theme of “home” and identity

2 Papastergiadis (1998), states that “home,” in the context of diaspora and migration, is the “center of the world” (“The Home in Modernity” 2). He argues that the home has “a centrifugal and centripetal force” and “combines both our inner and outer trajectories.” In this sense, I understand Papastergiadis’ analysis of “home” to mean an affective force that can “pull” the migrant to the home of origin, but that also “pushes” the migrant to adopt a new place, one that is different than the country of origin, as a place to belong to.

6 making. Through food as my lens, I aim to examine how notions of their hyphenated identities work in the context of the culturally different host home. What I consider as the

“texts” to be examined in this study are not only the videos themselves, but also the recipes they demonstrate and what these recipes, as I read them, reveal about Anuja and

Hetal’s work as cultural emissaries. I see Anuja and Hetal’s way of publishing their videos as a kind of cultural work that demonstrates to the YouTube sphere how the two presenters cook the food they know to be “familiar.” Their tendency to prepare Indian food in the American home alludes to the fact that the two women demonstrate a cultural fusion, where the Indian food reveals their need for the tastes of their childhoods, in the home left behind.

Often, when I ask my friends here in Canada why they like certain combinations of food and certain ways of eating, they relate their adult culinary preferences to childhood experiences. One friend for example likes to have baked potatoes for dinner with hot sauce on them because that is what she “grew up on.” Anuja and Hetal cook dishes of the “past” in their current home in the present because rice, chapattis and daals are what they grew up on. This is Anuja and Hetal’s way of retaining and maintaining connections to their sensory past, so that their children can have this connection to their own past homes, at least through food. In this way, they want to provide their own children a similar sensory childhood, and create for them a similar affective home, even if this home is geographically and culturally different.

Something that I can relate to personally now is the connection between me and how my mother would make dinner. When I was a child, and if I was around her during dinner time, none of the steps in her cooking process seemed particularly interesting to

7 me. But when I grew up a little, and took more interest in the culinary arts, I began to notice that there is a choreography that happens in the kitchen. There is always an order to the way a meal is put together. The lentils are soaked and put on the stove because they take the longest to cook. In the meantime, she continues her kitchen ritual by chopping up onions, making a paste in her grinder out of garlic and ginger and then cooking them in oil with other spices until the fragrance emanating from the pot tells her that it is time for the chicken, fish or beef to go in. And then she will start on the vegetables and when a burner becomes free, she will boil the rice. This is the last thing to be cooked so that the family can have a hot plate of rice with the accompanying sides.

I had taken all of these steps in her meal making ritual for granted. I also realized that I do my cooking in the same order she does, when I make traditional Bangladeshi meals. This is something that happened quite unconsciously because the way I learned how to put a meal together was from my mother, through unconscious osmosis and careless observation. I hadn’t realized I had picked up her habits just by being around her.

In Anuja and Hetal’s cooking channel, I see similarities in culinary logic between my own ways, my mother’s ways and theirs. And it is interesting to learn from them and to also see the way they navigate and organize their kitchen, making sure that some spices and ingredients are a staple in their diasporic kitchen. I recognize the fact that their videos are an archive of their tips and tricks, their own family recipes and their own interpretations on different recipes. I also understand why Anuja and Hetal, and so many others like them on YouTube and beyond, decide to make the cumbersome cuisines of the home of origin, when simpler options are always available.

It is not always easy to cook food from home in the context of the host country.

For example, before I entered Canada as an international student, my friends at home, some of whom were in North America decades ago, spoke to me about their experiences of cooking traditional food in their dorm rooms and apartments. One colleague mentioned how on one Eid about a decade ago, she had attempted to make a Bangladeshi roast chicken, and the smell lingered inside the walls of her Vancouver apartment. She was ashamed and spent many hours “airing out” her home with all her windows open in winter, and with candles lit so that the aromas would dissipate as fast as possible. She was conscious of this because she knew that the smells would not be tolerated well by other residents in the building and she was afraid of being told she couldn’t cook the food of her heritage, and ultimately, of being thrown out of her building. She had also shared stories of how when she served Bangladeshi food at potlucks, some of the local students

(not everyone) would take a few bites and leave the rest. This to her was an insult of the highest order, given that aside from her talents as a scholar, she took great pride in her cooking as well. This anecdote made me apprehensive about how different cultures and food are deemed “unacceptable” and hyper-sensual. For individuals who encounter a process of accepting the new home, these sentiments can be disheartening. To feel that elements of one’s own identity don’t fit into the place that is supposed to be home makes it difficult to truly feel like the host place is actually “home.”

Food cooked in Anuja and Hetal’s domestic space that is projected on YouTube creates an embedding of spaces. The diasporic kitchen that is reflected through the

“ShowMetheCurry” YouTube channel becomes a virtual reality in the homes of the audiences who access the videos. There is then a rendering of the real into the virtual

9 through the medium of YouTube, which also alludes to the different versions of “selves” of the video presenters. The “Anuja and Hetal” in the videos are performative versions of themselves, and audiences are allowed fragmentary glimpses of their daily lives through the videos. The fact that they show Indian recipes demonstrates a practicing of their

Indian heritage within their Texan diasporic home. When they show adapted recipes, such as the one for “Avocado Paratha Recipe-Guacamole Parathas,” as examined in

Chapter Two, they articulate a hybrid identity, one that melds the cultural influences of both India and the United States. The food also reveals how immigrants view themselves as “othered,” and how cultures of both the host country and the immigrant’s home of origin collapse into each other. The food cooked in their domestic space is then a metaphor for the way they adapt the culture of the host country. It is also a representation of resistance, in their attempt to retain cultural traditions of the home of origin.

While experiences of adaptation may differ from person to person, from people of different homes of origin, such as those coming from Bangladesh, India, China, Japan,

Nigeria, who immigrate to places such as Canada, the US, Australia or to England, the common denominator in all of these different immigrant experiences is the fact that a change of contexts will entail a learning of new ways of living. Migration often means a need to negotiate traditions of the past home and the cultural influences of the present home in aspects of everyday life such as food and clothing. While this may also sound like a generalization, I will focus in more detail, for example in Chapter Two, on how these “negotiations” are made, at least as demonstrated in these cooking videos, which will serve as my case study.

In this thesis, I examine different elements that define home and the way immigrants “make” home through food, and the way the characterization of food also interpellates the immigrant in the host country. The specific experiences of each diasporic individual within the context of the host country will differ. But what my investigation aims to do is to explore how “home” works through Anuja and Hetal’s videos. For some, the context of the host home can be an experience riddled with culture shock, and the interior domestic space within that context then acts as a solace.

The YouTube platform acts as a dynamic space, for example, that enables viewers from all over the world to access the “ShowMetheCurry” channel. This space, which I read as a heterotopia, a space of “oppositions,”3 allows for a blurring and often a subversion of roles and spaces. For example, Anuja and Hetal can be performers on the

YouTube platform, but may also be members of the audience when they replay not only their own videos, but also videos on other channels. They become participants in the discourse surrounding their recipes when they answer queries and interact with their users. The presenters can oscillate as both the subjects who publish these videos and interact with the audiences, and as the performers in the videos. The YouTube platform, in general, also allows for a circulation of many different images of a particular “place.”

India, for example, is presented in a limited way, exoticized through these recipes, as I also show in examining cookbooks such as The Complete Asian Cookbook, and marketing by food companies such as Kraft Foods and Betty Crocker. On other channels on YouTube, however, news stories of poverty and political upheaval can paint yet another picture of the region, and viewers can access these versions of one place

3 See Foucault “Of Othered Spaces” (23).

11 simultaneously. Anuja and Hetal’s domestic space is also presented on screen and is accessed in the audience’s own private space, whether it is on the audience’s own computer, or on their smartphone. This space of the channel then binds and connects audiences and performers, and blurs distinctions between private and public as a global

YouTube audience can access Anuja and Hetal’s private kitchen.

I also look at how cooking is an act of resistance, especially from the space of the

“in-between” cultural space that the immigrant inhabits, and how food can be a metaphor for the way the immigrant from the Indian subcontinent can be racialized in the way it is perceived and “sold” in the context of the host home. I do this by progressing thematically in my analysis of food and this particular YouTube channel, to see how context, space, and the work of cooking and food itself can reveal ideas about the ways immigrants can experience the host “home.”

I argue that these recipe stories do many things: they not only reveal how Anuja and Hetal articulate their hybrid Indian-American identities, but these stories also solidify, in their articulation, a way for unacknowledged domestic labor to be recognized by a broader public. Cooking here is redefined. It is not only a simple act of nurturing that confines the homemaker to the domestic space, but instead is a creative act of nourishment and community making. This is a way that family stories and works that are ephemeral are archived and recollected, escaping the fragile grip of forgetting. The way

Anuja and Hetal “publish” their recipes brings attention to the kind of work that takes place in the domestic sphere, and the way food operates as a metaphor for identity and

“home” making.

This concept of the home is left purposely ambiguous in the context of my research. When I write about “home,” I allude both to the domestic space and context of the immigrant in her host country, as well as the “home” she has left behind, the “home” of origin. The term homemaking in this context is also meant to be read in two different ways. For example, homemaking not only entails the process of creating a domestic space within the host country and the work of the domestic sphere that cooking is thought to be. I read homemaking as the process by which the elements of the home of origin, especially in terms of recipes and memories connected to those recipes, are carried on to the present, creating a domesticity that contains within it a microcosm of the “home” left behind in India. For example, Anuja and Hetal show that they not only conform to the cultural influences of their home in Texas, but also cook dishes from the many different regions of India. “ShowMetheCurry” archives recipes that make it easy for other subcontinental diasporics, and anyone else interested in subcontinental cooking, to prepare these foods in their own homes. Recipes such as the one for “Bengali Mustard

Fish Curry” (Chapter Three) show how the traditional tastes of the subcontinent can be replicated in the host home. On the other hand, “Masala Cornish Hen” reveals the hybrid nature of Anuja and Hetal’s identities, as they infuse a Thanksgiving tradition, one adopted in the host home, with the masala, or spices from the Indian subcontinent.

The two presenters achieve hybridity by sometimes modifying traditional Indian recipes to the conveniences and requirements of the host home, as in the case of “Kathal

(Jackfruit) Kebab Recipe” (Chapter Two and Chapter Three), where they suggest using canned pureed jackfruit instead of the fresh fruit, which is in abundance in parts of the

Indian subcontinent during the summer months. While their channel and website

13 emphasize the fact that their recipes are mainly to show Indian food, Anuja and Hetal also show how to make Mexican, Italian and Chinese recipes as well. This multicultural dimension of their culinary corpus is important because it is indicative of the culinary influences of the host home that have made their way into Anuja and Hetal’s repertoire of recipes.

Another important work that the “ShowMetheCurry” channel achieves is the way the “invisible” labor of the domestic sphere is made visible in the YouTube public sphere. The work of cooking provides agency and authority to Anuja and Hetal, who use this medium to archive their work in the host home. YouTube performs a critical function in recording the everyday work of these women in the domestic kitchen. The hours it takes to make a meal for a celebration, or even the time it takes to prepare a roast or an elaborate roghan josh for example, is taken for granted. Cooking shows allow this type of work to be recorded, and not just consumed when the dish is eaten. YouTube affords this type of privilege to record such work to the average user with a computer and a camera.

This means that the tasks of cooking and food preparation are not lost, and somewhere in the world resides a viewer, who appreciates, values and takes notice of such domestic work. The work of the domestic sphere is broadcast into a vast digital public sphere, and food becomes language, story and setting.

By presenting parts of their everyday lives, Anuja and Hetal illuminate how the

“invisible” and fleeting work of cooking becomes permanent through this medium. Their culinary knowledge and interpretations of the traditional are rendered accessible and recorded, not only for YouTube audiences at large, but also for their own children.

Culinary interpretations also become a documented record of adaptation of the traditional

14 in the context of Anuja and Hetal’s culinary videos. I will explore how cooking and more specifically, the transference of culinary knowledge becomes an act of recording histories and journeys. In Chapter Four, I review Yasmin Alibhai- Brown’s The Settler’s

Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food, in which the author explains how the recipes she presents are connected to the journeys of her family, and memories are connected to particular recipes. The recipes of her family have been collected and transferred through and among her relatives, and the culmination of the book is recording of those journeys. At the end of her prologue, she reflects that the book of recipes and anecdotes about her family contains “collective memories” (17). With each recipe that is connected to particular moments from her upbringing in Uganda with her family, and then her own journey to England, Alibhai-Brown brings to the public sphere a recording of her own migration history, one that is also connected to the food and memories of her family members .

On YouTube, another aspect of these videos is the audience. I argue that

“ShowMetheCurry” subscribers connect to these recipes because of a shared nostalgia and longing for home. Their YouTube search for the tastes of the cuisines of the Indian subcontinent leads them to the “ShowMetheCurry” channel, and they connect to Anuja and Hetal through a shared interest in familiar recipes. The audience also consists of members from other parts of the world who have no historical ties to the subcontinent.

But this category of viewers watches the videos on this channel to satisfy an interest in the “exotic,” with which the Indian subcontinent is often equated.4

And so, Anuja and Hetal cater to two cravings: one for the familiar and one for the “exotic.”5 Specifically, when they show recipes that are a part of their own childhoods, for example in the video entitled “Show Me the Curry's Suji Halwa Dessert

Recipe” (Chapter Three), they show their own need to recreate the familiar for themselves. This sentiment will resonate with viewers who are also familiar with this dish. On the other hand, Anuja and Hetal also portray the “exotic,” with videos with titles such as “Sol Kadi - Exotic Indian Drink Recipe Video” and “Eggplant in Exotic Indian

Spices - Aachari Baingan Recipe” where they use the word “exotic” in the titles, to entice viewers and again, associate “exoticism” with their home of origin, hinting at a double- consciousness of their own identity.

With their recipes, Anuja and Hetal define and explore definitions of space and place. YouTube itself becomes a “home,” one that not only houses their recipes and their own stories of the past and present, but also a digital sphere that individuals who are physically far away from their homes of origin may find solace and acceptance in.

4 This Western treatment of India as an “exotic” entity can be seen in the popularity of films such as Eat Pray Love (2010), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), Monsoon Wedding (2001) and Bride and Prejudice (2004). 5 See Elliot Gaines’ article (2005) “Interpreting India, Identity, and Media From the Field: Exploring the Communicative Nature of the Exotic Other,” which explores how the author’s own preconceived notions about India were constructed through “media narratives…where people dress, speak, and act in ways distinctly different from yet appealing to certain Western values and beliefs” (4). After spending some time in India doing research, his ideas about the “exotic” changed as his surroundings became more familiar.

The Project: Overview

In the context of my thesis, I use the term “subcontinent” to allude to the people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, although most of the focus will be on India, given that the hosts of the “ShowMetheCurry” channel are from there. I also understand the fact that

India itself is a broad region, since the country is culturally diverse, with many different religions, languages and cultural groups with their own traditions and dietary habits. The same goes with my inclusion of the regions of Bangladesh and Pakistan. Though smaller in area, these regions are still very complicated in the way the cultures, languages and their own indigenous groups exist, even if on the margins. Because of the sheer vastness of the “subcontinent,” I will have to resort to what might seem like a broad generalization when I use this term, but this is in the interest of reading Anuja and Hetal in contrast to the other populations in the West. If I do make generalizations, this is not a way to disregard different cultural diversities and is not a way to ignore that differences do exist within the countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

In reading the “characters” in the videos, I attempt to make thematic connections through concepts explored in literature, some scholarly work that examines similar issues and also through other cultural texts. These include cookbooks like The Complete Asian

Cookbook and Madhur Jaffery’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking; cooking shows on television, for example, the ones hosted by Nigella Lawson and Martha Stewart; and other channels on YouTube such as “Foodwishes” and “EverydayFoodVideos” (Chapter

Five). I aim to read how these recipes are presented, and how along with Anuja and

Hetal’s YouTube videos, cooking shows, cookbooks and literary texts explore concepts of “home,” “space,” and identity.

I read these videos as stories, in the way of oral traditions that are broadcast through the very new medium of YouTube. One aim of my project is to make an original contribution to analyze the way food, YouTube and concepts I have talked about above interact as a part of everyday life, especially in the context of cultural “in-betweenness.” I read YouTube videos as a vibrant corpus of vignettes in video form, spanning different genres of “characters” and performances that reveal aspects of individual identities and everyday lives. The medium is also an interesting way to study the spontaneous production of language, where stories are narrated and not necessarily scripted. Because of this element of communication, YouTube videos, according to John Hartley in “Uses of YouTube: Digital Literacy and the Growth of Knowledge,” have brought back a focus on verbal communication. Hartley likens YouTube videos to oral narratives and states that this form of communication “may be restoring an ancient, multi-voice mode of narration to cultural visibility” (137). YouTube’s reach to global audiences, through its availability and through the medium of the English language, is also an interesting site of study in how publics and communities are formed online. I also aim to illustrate the fact that YouTube is a rich source of data, and that in this platform, there are many documented moments of everyday living. Studying particular videos on YouTube can help us explore more about how technology is now changing the way we think about the projection of the self, space and “home,” and why the home space of strangers on

YouTube is such fascinating new territory for audiences.

While arguments can be made that nostalgia and homesickness are now non- issues with the availability of Skype and YouTube, the fact remains that voice and image do not replace other sensory needs, such as tastes, sounds, touch and smells. Even if a

Bangladeshi in Toronto is engaged in a Skype conversation with his family in Dhaka, the technologically mediated conversation does not compensate for the difference in time zones, or for the fact that the smells of the environment, the taste of the water, the noises of the streets and the very experiences of winters and monsoons are never going to be the same as what the he or she knows to be the familiar environmental sensations of “home,” as situated in the country of origin.

In my opinion, now even more than ever, the “in-between” home is more pronounced because of these technologies. Hybridity is more present and apparent in the everyday reality of the immigrant, because spaces and places, public and private, are concentric and multi dimensional. The YouTube platform, for example, allows for the transposition of different temporalities and cultures to be available in the domestic sphere of the user. When the iPhone is carried by the diasporic subject, for example, the connection to the home of origin through this new technological medium becomes part of their corporeality and everyday reality.

Again, this study offers a way to understand and write about a particular channel, and two particular diasporic individuals in the context of their Texas home. This is in no way a complete and comprehensive study of each and every cultural group within different diasporas in different countries. I aim to read these recipe videos in light of what else has been written in the field of diasporic food studies, especially by scholars such as

Anita Mannur, Martin Manalansan IV and Psyche Williams-Forson, among others. I also reference the works of theorists of diaspora studies, such as Nikos Papastergiadis, Vijay

Agnew and Sara Ahmed, for example, by looking at how food works as a metaphor for

19 adaptation, change and also cultural allegiance, and how food is linked to identity and ways of creating and invoking “home.”

Nevertheless, any text is a site for debate. There is no work that can ever be considered complete and definite, and my project is no different. While I aim to do a textual analysis of these YouTube videos, and to make thematic connections through concepts from cultural studies, diasporic studies, and literary studies, I also understand the limited scope of this project in terms of expanding into more critical use of specific theoretical frameworks. I hope to combine particular concepts (such as “home,” space, exoticism and domestic work) from these disciplines and explore how the “home” of origin is in negotiation within the private domestic space of the immigrant.

The Investigation: Stories in the Context of Re-Homing, Nostalgia, Spatiality, and

Knowledge Transfer

I begin by exploring how the host country can function as a context that alienates and “exoticizes” many diasporic individuals. The immigrant has to “re-home,”6 a term used by Benzi Zhang, which means to recreate not only a domesticity within this host country, but also to become a part of the host community itself. Re-homing means adapting to the host home, but that of course means overcoming images and media representations that “other” and exoticize the diasporic individual. Re-homing entails a way for the diasporic subject to become a part of a larger community in the host country,

6 Benzi Zhang (2004) notes that “diaspora hence refers not only to a movement from one place to another, but also to the transition that implicates a paradoxical, multilayered de- homing and re-homing process.” He makes a distinction between the two homing processes. The de-homing process denotes the process of leaving behind the past home whereas the re-homing process entails the remaking of a new home in the host country.

20 and in the context of my research, this is often done by connecting through YouTube to others from the Indian subcontinent in the host country. Presenters Anuja and Hetal post recipe videos to make that broader connection to other diasporic individuals. The recipes reflect their cultural in-betweenness, as they adapt “traditional” ways of cooking to more convenient ways of cooking.

In the individual segments, the two presenters evoke cooking traditions that are handed down through a matrilineal exchange in India. For example in their first video

“Varan Recipe-Maharashtrian Daal (soup),” Anuja and Hetal follow a “teacher-student” pedagogical structure, where Anuja plays the role of student, thus mimicking a matrilineal dynamic of a kitchen space. Hetal announces at the end of the video that this recipe is one that was given to her by her mother-in-law. The evocation of this maternal figure demonstrates how within Hetal’s family, cooking has been a site of matrilineal exchange, through the handing down of culinary and cultural traditions.

In a video about “Sheera,” Hetal explains that the dessert is something that comes to mind when she thinks of “my mother and my children in the same sentence, this recipe defines it all” (“Show Me the Curry's Suji Halwa Dessert Recipe”). While this might allude to how traditional gender roles, at least in Anuja and Hetal’s families, are reinforced, given that both presenters associate cooking with their mothers, it also shows a subversion of cooking as a traditional activity confined to the domestic sphere, given that for Anuja and Hetal, YouTube has provided a way for them to bring this traditionally domestic activity into the public sphere.

In the second chapter, I explain how Anuja and Hetal evoke “home” through food. The past home is always a ghostly presence in the present. The domestic spaces that

Anuja and Hetal have made for themselves in Texas operate as a microcosm of the past home because of the food and culinary traditions they continue. The YouTube channel

“ShowMetheCurry” works, both for Anuja and Hetal and their audiences all over the world, to make connections with those who also experience culinary nostalgia because they are far away from their homes of origin.

What I term “epidermal connection” and “epidermal recognition,” terms that I discuss in Chapter Two, refers to a connection made upon the recognition that a person is of the same race and shares a similar history. I read this connection inversely to what

Franz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks, terms as an “epidermal racial schema,” which alludes to how the history of a race is inscribed in skin (92), and how the white “gaze” can racialize the object of the gaze. I mean “epidermal recognition” to denote a recognition and not a racialization, where the gaze, in the context of my research, alludes to a curiosity about whether the “gazed upon” subject, in the context of a foreign home, is from the same region and cultural background as the onlooker. This curiosity stems from a need to find connections, through strangers, to the home that has been left behind. I think this concept is important in the way audiences are attracted to Anuja and Hetal’s channel, given that the presenters are “recognized” by viewers to be of Indian origin, and this recognition then offers an insider’s knowledge of Indian cuisine.

In the context of cooking videos, epidermal recognition helps to develop connections between the audience and Anuja and Hetal. The epidermal recognition, or epidermal connection, is the way that the link to India can often provide a context for the

22 need to connect, through the recognition that there is a shared history among the onlooker and the “gazed upon,” a recognition of the fact that there is a connection to a same place and history. In the YouTube sphere, this works very obviously, because of the fact that the audience is able to recognize this in Anuja and Hetal’s appearances, sometimes in their sartorial choices to wear saris in some of their videos. The recognition also occurs because of the titles of recipes and through the linguistic markers, through the recognition of the inflections of Hindi, for example, on the English language, the fact that Anuja and

Hetal are from India. This recognition works to create a public on the YouTube sphere, where Anuja and Hetal, in their state of “in-betweenness,” also connect to others who share a similar interest not only in Indian cooking, but also to those who are living in- between cultures. My second chapter also reads how “home,” as a part of the past context, also exists within the host place.

In the third chapter, I explore the dynamic spatiality that is created through the

“ShowMetheCurry” cooking channel. The YouTube diaspora is a liminal space that is heterotopic because it changes the notion of a traditional hierarchal space and place. This

YouTube heterotopia is a juxtaposition of spaces, identities and temporalities. The heterotopia, in Foucauldian terms, is a place and space, a negotiation of somewhere and nowhere, where the real domestic sphere of Anuja and Hetal then becomes a virtual space for their audiences. In my study, I look at it as a space where the reality of the physical context of the audience’s space merges with the virtual yet real space projected on

YouTube. The YouTube space in this case, the home and kitchen space of Anuja and

Hetal, also becomes a part of the audience’s everyday reality. And encompassing all of these spaces is the idea of the past home that Anuja and Hetal long for and try to grasp

23 through their cooking. Moreover, time is simultaneous, because videos can be accessed in no particular order, making it a space that is devoid of chronological importance. What is important, instead, is a shared identity. The digital diasporic community in this sense, then, is created through a shared interest in similar food items, or in the creation of an interaction with the diasporic community that resides online. The community that forms through “ShowMetheCurry” shows how strangers within a global public can find commonalities through particular recipes, and through the discourses these recipes embed. As I will explain later, users online ask each other questions about specific utensils and ingredients and debate the “authenticity” of certain dishes. The YouTube audience/presenter interaction happens through a multi-layered space and redefines the notion of “home.” So the “home” is redefined here, crossing cultural and spatial boundaries, because access entails an interaction that cuts across the digital space

(YouTube and the kitchen projected on this sphere), the domestic space (the home that the user accesses the videos from), and the geographical setting, or the country that the audiences and the presenters are situated in.

YouTube, as a platform, allows for a blurring of boundaries. The content on

YouTube, democratic as it is, focuses on the many aspects of the private sphere. Some presenters deal with videos that range from how-to videos of themselves providing tutorials, from cooking and gardening, to even teaching YouTube audiences how to fix a plumbing problem, or just showing home videos of their family members. Hosts of other channels also use the YouTube platform as their video diaries which record the everyday occurrences in the lives of the presenters. In this way, YouTube and its contents merge together the private and the public, because of the fact that the audiences of YouTube

24 now have access to personal stories and domestic spaces. The YouTube channel then provides a connection of embedded spaces, where the domesticity of the

“ShowMetheCurry” channel, for example, merges with Anuja and Hetal’s sensory evocations of India in the kitchen space in Texas, and connects these spaces to the audience’s own domesticities, cultural histories and interest in “other” and “foreign” spaces. The result is that YouTube contains many versions of one particular place, which viewers can access simultaneously. The channel then works to present “India,” for example as “exotic” and culturally rich, while other channels on the same platform may contain images and videos that present the region’s problems. The effect is that this heterotopic platform presents a juxtaposition of a fantasy and reality of India in a blurring of the public and private.

In the fourth chapter, I argue that cooking is an act of resistance, to both cultural and patriarchal norms, and an articulation of identity and work that is often taken for granted in the public sphere. Food and recipe stories are a form of life writing, because food and memory are connected; these recipes on YouTube are then recorded and made permanent and public. These stories are a way for the diasporic YouTubers to solidify their presence in the host land. The food they cook and the recipe stories they tell are a part of the way they “make” a “home” in the present. These are not just cooking videos, but are revelations about what is familiar. The food videos reveal what Anuja and Hetal used to know as the comforts of their home in the past, and also about how traditional recipes are altered and made along with recipes that are a part of the cuisine of the multicultural host context. These are stories that evoke the past and also tell the audience how one “makes-do” with what ingredients are available in the new home (something I

25 also explore by analyzing specific recipes in Chapter Two). They speak of how many adapt in the present and in some ways, also “speak” a language of cultural resistance from within the “in-between” diasporic space. But what is interesting is that the telling of these personal stories also entails a performance, one that only reveals a fragmented version of the identities of Anuja and Hetal. Nevertheless, recipe stories on YouTube afford Anuja and Hetal the opportunity to become “cultural emissaries,” as Uma Narayan defines this in “Through the Looking-Glass Darkly,” and to assert their own agency in the public sphere. The YouTube sphere becomes an archive of these stories and subjectivities.

This thesis argues that cooking enables a transfer of knowledge among generations. And while cookbooks can provide ingredients and methods for making recipes, they cannot “show” how they are performed. Video recipes fill this lack to some extent, providing visual proof of how a recipe is executed. But what both these media fail to account for is the fact that some recipes take time and practice to master. Recipes such as the paratha for example, will never be mastered in one single try. The texture of the dough and the making of a perfect circle involve an investment of time. The movements that are required to make this recipe for example require a knack and accuracy of judgment for feeling the texture of the dough. To those who can make a perfect paratha, this is something that is knowledge embedded in their body and hands. And the pedagogy involved in teaching such a recipe is the revelation of corporeal biographies. What is interesting is the fact the biography is not only in the making of the paratha itself, but also in the way stories are exchanged at the very moment the recipe is being taught.

In the fourth chapter, I also investigate how The Complete Asian Cookbook, published in Australia, promises “authenticity” and a comprehensive knowledge of the culinary history of the continent. This text is particularly problematic in the way it promises a “complete” account of “Asian” cooking, promising to represent all regions of

“Asia.” But this cookbook orientalizes the region, and promises a mythical intention of being able to achieve mastery of the “exotic.” The way that “Asia” is represented in this particular cookbook is through fragmentary representations of particular foods that are exciting in the cosmopolitan, globalized world. One obvious way the book achieves this feeling of “exoticism” is through its photographs and in the edition I have studied, with its colorful printed silk book cover. I also look at how brands such as Kraft Food and

Betty Crocker present “exoticness,” “multiculturalism” and domestic work in general.

The way these “texts” represent the act of cooking is also different than how Anuja and

Hetal define it. While Kraft and Betty Crocker “sell” products that make the “exotic” seem easily attainable in the domestic space, Anuja and Hetal present their actual domestic space and cooking as not “commercial” in this sense. The act of cooking Indian food in Anuja and Hetal’s channel is treated as a part of their daily life, something that stems from the organic experience of growing up in India. Whereas these brands categorize recipes using their products under “global” and “Indian,” to associate the versatility of their products to create “multicultural” cuisines, Anuja and Hetal, even sometimes capitalizing on the “exotic,” bring more attention to the work of cooking in the domestic sphere, rather than exploiting “exoticism” and “authenticity” as unique selling points. Where cooking for Anuja and Hetal has personal and historical implications, cooking as demonstrated by the brands mentioned above relegates the act to

27 the public sphere, but can also be misrepresentative in terms of how they capitalize on the

“exotic.”

The Betty Crocker brand, for example, has undergone a change in the last few decades, by trying to assign an emblem of the brand that is culturally ambiguous. This is meant to represent the many races of women that reside in North America. I argue that this is problematic because this “multiculturalism” also homogenizes different cultures, for example, by suggesting that Hispanic and Indian cultures can be similar. In contrast,

“ShowMetheCurry” incorporates a form of resistance that allows for a representation of the subcontinental region from and within a diasporic context. This channel also shows the cuisine that is a result of “making do” with ingredients that are familiar to those who live far away from their homes of origins. Anuja and Hetal’s channel also presents recipes with “substitutions” that are found in the host home.

When Anuja or Hetal perform the tasks of the domestic sphere, they assume an intersubjective position, often oscillating between the roles of mother and daughter. The two women represent how the way one mothers and cooks is often mimicry of the way one’s own mothers performed these roles, as explored in the sociological case study

“Practices, Identification and Identity Change in the Transition to Motherhood” (Heather

Elliot et al). This is an unconscious doing, but what it represents is the fact that the performance of the domestic roles means that the past is always there in the present, and that the evocation of the home of origin is also always dormant in the recipes and stories.

In this way, cooking and methods that are often learned in the past make themselves permanent in their everyday corporealities.

And finally, I consider how food works to interpellate individuals who inhabit different cultural systems and inform their divided subjectivities. I also explore how stigmas related to subcontinental food work to alienate, “other” and exoticize the diasporic individual. In this final chapter, I investigate how ingredients in food, and adaptations as suggested by Anuja and Hetal on their channel, may explain subjectivity in relation to the “home” the two presenters are embedded in. I will examine at how

“ethnic” food is categorized in the North American context, and how this can influence the self-consciousness of someone who is from a different cultural context. For example,

Anuja and Hetal include a video that shows how to rid Tupperware of “curry stains.” I explain how this is a metaphor for the fact that Anuja and Hetal “edit” elements of their food and culture to fit into the context of the host home.

In some cases, diasporic individuals from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, for example, who immigrate to North America or other parts of the world, have to cradle their identities in a space of “in-betweenness,” hovering between the states of tradition and modernity. To take a literary example, in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, the protagonist’s many names symbolize the cultural contradictions he faces as a second generation Indian-American. His parents name him Gogol and Nikhil, in the Bengali tradition of having a “proper” and a nickname. As a child in school, he rejects the name

Nikhil and decides he wants to be known as Gogol. As a young adult, he starts resenting his name “Gogol,” not understanding the significance of the name, the fact that his father names him after Nikolai Gogol, whose collection of short stories he was reading while he was in an accident. He changes his first name back to Nikhil, and his American friends shorten that name to Nick. The rejection of his name is a metaphor for his struggle in

29 negotiating his Indian-Bengali upbringing within the domestic sphere of his parents, and his interactions with his American friends and society.

In the same way that Gogol/Nikhil, as a second generation American-Indian struggles with his identity, and the way Mrs. Sen, in “Mrs. Sen’s,” chooses to wear saris and use in her American kitchen, instead of a knife, “a blade that curved like the prow of a Viking ship” (114), Anuja and Hetal demonstrate a negotiation of cultural influences.

Whereas Nikhil/ Gogol comes to terms with his hyphenated (Indian-American) identity at the end of the novel, and Mrs. Sen struggles with accepting her new host country, Anuja and Hetal have made negotiations, their English cooking channel teaches Indian cuisine, both traditional and adapted, to a global audience.

Using the examples of Kraft Foods and Betty Crocker that I discuss in Chapter

Four, in this final chapter I argue in more detail about how these brands characterize different countries and regions to audiences and readers. The Complete Asian Cookbook, for example, attempts to reveal to readers the tastes and flavors of “Asia.” The book offers fragmented views of the cuisines of Thailand, Japan, China, Vietnam, Bangladesh,

Pakistan and India, often just providing a survey of regions, without going into detail about what the distinct culinary traditions of these specific places actually entail. Kraft

Food and Betty Crocker, especially on their websites, also attempt to characterize the cuisine of India through the use of “curry” and masala. In these representations, the regional distinctions of the Indian subcontinent are missing. Bangladeshi cuisine is often categorized under “Indian,” and even then, the different ranges of flavors and cooking methods are “exoticized” and at the same time, simplified. This miscategorization by the

30 cookbook and brands mentioned above also affects the way diasporic individuals look at themselves in their new contexts.

Chapter One: Food and the Solace of the Digital Domestic Home Space

When individuals arrive in a new country and attempt to make a home in a new setting, they encounter a spectrum of affects that range from loss and mourning, to adaptation and resistance and finally to acceptance. This affective range is a part of both the homing and “re-homing process,” as Benzi Zhang calls it. The homing process is the process in which the diasporic individual creates a new domesticity. The “re-homing process” involves a negotiation of the past and present homes, and an acceptance of the host country as “home.” The negotiation entails a “letting go” of the past and absorbing the ways of life of the host home. When the symbolic order of the host home interpellates the newly landed individual as “foreign,” the context of the host country fails to produce the affects or sentiments of attachment that one has to the original “home.”

The “melancholic migrant,”7 a term coined by Sara Ahmed, looks to evoke familiarity by using objects and artifacts from “home,” thus retaining cultural elements of the home left behind while in the present host country. Food and recipes in this scenario become objects that create the affect of happiness. To counter the effects of alienation then, many diasporic individuals attempt to bring in the familiar in the new host home.

But in this process she or he has to succumb to melancholy, something that stems from attempting to collapse the two homes together in bringing the past into the present. “The melancholic migrant holds onto the unhappy objects of differences, such as the turban or at least the memory of being teased about the turban, which ties it to a history of racism”

(48). Ahmed then indicates that melancholy is an affect that results from the “migrant”

7 See Sara Ahmed’s “Happy Objects” (2010).

32 holding on to the past, making the objects and traditions “unhappy” since she does not belong to the context of the new host home. Something like the turban, in Ahmed’s discussion of Bend it Like Beckham, is then a reminder of difference, marking the diasporic individual an “othered” subject in the context of the host home. While the turban is symbolically and culturally different than food, I read similarities in the way that the food of many immigrants, like the turban, the sari and other cultural markers, can often represent the foreignness of the migrant. But melancholy is also what motivates the diasporic individual to cling to the past. The diasporic subject then is inevitably entangled in this affective cycle of nostalgia, melancholy and solace.

The presence of digital media in the context and setting of everyday reality, and the way it provides access to different times and spaces, I argue, enables this entanglement.8 For example, YouTube’s presence allows us to access the daily lives of users situated anywhere in the world. This medium, within one single platform, offers global access to various subjectivities and genres of videos that offer the projection of intimate private moments, in the form of glimpses of humorous videos of pets and children, and often nonsensical videos such as those by presenters like Hannah Hart and her channel “My Drunk Kitchen.” In this sense, it is easy to live beyond the present moment and space, and to bring in not only a different temporality, but also a different spatiality in the space of the present. YouTube then allows its users to live in moments of

8 J. Macgregor Wise (2011) states that “modern subjectivity is not simply about being watched, but also of watching” (202). He also goes on to state that at least in the context of the internet, the projection and broadcasting of everyday life is more about its awareness, than about its accuracy of representation (203). In citing Henry Lefebvre, he states that the presentation of everyday life entails a critique of it. “They are that critique in so far as they are other than everyday life, and yet they are in everyday life, they are alienation” (Lefebvre qtd. in Wise 203).

“in-betweenness” and in different versions of homes.9 The YouTube audience then is able to move back and forth in times and spaces. Geographical and cultural boundaries become relaxed and home takes on new layers.

I am interested in exploring how Anuja and Hetal project their “happy objects,” or objects of nostalgia, in food and cooking, through the medium of YouTube. I will examine how Anuja and Hetal, through their YouTube channel “ShowMeTheCurry” inhabit different layers of home. The two women attempt to show new ways of adapting old recipes, by doctoring traditional ways of cooking to conform to the ingredients and amenities that are available in their Texas host home. The two presenters promise a subcontinental culinary experience on their website:

North Indian Recipes, Punjabi Recipes, South Indian Recipes, Gujarati Recipes,

Bengali Recipes, Rajasthani Recipes, Thai Recipes, Indo Chinese Recipes, Kerala

Recipes. Our recipe videos include Vegetarian Indian Recipes, Vegan Recipes,

Healthy Indian Recipes as well as Nonveg Indian Recipes. 10

But as we scroll through the database of the videos on YouTube, we can see that the presenters not only offer “Indian” food, but also recipes that are a part of the culinary context of their host home in Texas. Anuja and Hetal even show recipes that reflect the

9 Mark Liechty (1996) cites David Morley and Kevin Robins by stating that identity is linked to memory, and a “memory of home” (119). YouTubers then construct their narratives and concept of home through these inherited memories and this home of the imaginary past informs their identity in the present home in the host country. But this identity in the present is also one that informs and is a testament to the idea of home and citizenship in the present, as mediated through the digital platform of YouTube. In a way then, a version of the past home is constantly recycled. 10 The descriptive blurb on their website can be accessed at http://showmethecurry.com/about.

34 traditions and holidays of the past and also in the present in the US. Instead of only celebrating Eid11 or Diwali,12 Anuja and Hetal as diasporic individuals now adopt new celebrations as well. For example, to celebrate the “holiday season” in December, the two presenters offer recipes such as “Eggless Fruit & Nut Cake” (2011) and “Masala Cornish

Hen for Thanksgiving Indian Recipe” (2010). In contrast to Anuja and Hetal’s acceptance of this holiday, some of my new immigrant friends in Toronto demonstrate an apathy and even a reluctance towards the celebration of this holiday. It is a part of the culture of the new home, one that the diasporic subject is at first is reluctant to celebrate, because somehow it would mean giving up the allegiance to customs and traditions of the past.

The resistance and hostility come from the belief that maybe buying a Christmas tree and decorating it makes the immigrant a lesser member of the home of origin. Again, a literary example of cultural resistance is Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s,” in which the title character resists adopting the cultural elements of her home in America. She insists on wearing saris and craves fresh fish, to satiate the tastes of her home in India. She resists learning how to drive and as she explains to the mother of the child, Eliot, she babysits,

“At home, you know, we have a driver” (133). This evocation of “home” alludes not to her home in America, but to her home of origin in India.

11 A Muslim holiday. There are two Eid different Eid occasions every year in the Islamic calendar. “Eid-Ul-Fitr” falls after the month of Ramadan and “Eid-Ul-Adha” comes after two months of “Eid-Ul-Fitr,” where animals, typically cows and goats are sacrificed, distributed and cooked for feasts for a period of three days. On both Eid occasions, elaborate sweets are prepared to be served to guests who come to visit each other. 12 Diwali is also a religious holiday, celebrated by the Hindu population all over the world. Hinduism prohibits the eating of beef, so celebrations include the cooking and distribution of sweets, usually made from milk and other dairy products.

Each video clip on “ShowMeTheCurry” can be read as a story. The channel itself, which promises to show Indian recipes, does so on the premise of satiating a craving for culinary nostalgia, to satisfy a sensory need to evoke the past in the present. As producers and publishers of these videos, Anuja and Hetal aim to connect to others who have this need. But in the creation of these videos, they are also telling personal stories of their journeys and histories. In general, these videos reveal the fact that in the host home, they will not forget or forgo the culture of their home of origin. The short video narratives testify to the fact that the two women are also preserving their heritage and recording it, to be accessed by not only their own kin, but also the general public. The expression of the recipe stories is also a way for the two women to solidify their subcontinental identities in the context of the host home, where the fluctuating multicultural environment can often mean a contentious effort to ground one’s identity in the context of the past.

It is only over a certain number of years that one might decide to adopt the traditions of the new land. And along with Eid and Diwali, they may celebrate Halloween and Thanksgiving. On Christmas, they might buy and decorate a tree, and make

Christmas and Thanksgiving meals. Over time, they may learn to perceive these occasions as celebrations and events that provide opportunities to be part of the new country. A personal account of this is published in The Huffington Post by journalist

Shamim Chowdhury, a British Bangladeshi journalist residing in London, England:

Because, despite what the Daily Mail will have its readers believe, Christmas is as

special for many Muslims as it is for the mainstream population. It does not mean

we have given up our core beliefs--it must be stressed here that we categorically

do not celebrate the birth of Jesus--it is simply a pronouncement of our respect for

the customs of the land and a celebration of multiculturalism. Oh, and an excuse

to eat, because boy, do we Muslims love our food.” (“Why as a Muslim I

Celebrate Christmas”)

The same article also states how food on Christmas also reflects a hybridity in the context of Christmas celebrations, with the home of the journalist hosting Christmas meals with food from the home of origin and also food from the culture of the host country:

Muslim mothers all over the country will wake up extra-early to fretfully hoist the

bird into the oven in good time for when the hordes of relatives bundle through

the front door. When they do arrive--invariably late, as is the Muslim way--

chances are they will be greeted by the unmistakable wafts of turmeric powder

and garam masala which have been liberally smothered all over the turkey. These

aromas will be mingled with the pungent fragrances of the mutton biryani, dhal

and halwa that will accompany the roast potatoes, mince pies and cranberry sauce.

(Chowdhury)

Chowdhury’s account then serves as an example of acceptance and hybridity. Christmas is celebrated not only with traditional Christmas meals but also with dishes from the home of origin, emphasizing the fact that the holiday becomes something separate from religion and instead becomes a reason for celebration and participation. The temporal distance, the time that is needed for the diasporic self to adjust and adopt the ways and traditions of the new “home,” makes it possible to separate these celebrations from a religious and cultural context. While some may adopt the traditions of the new context,

37 such as Christmas, and buying a tree and decorating it to participate in the festivities that surround a South Asian diasporic subject in Canada, others simply resist the need to adopt the celebrations and customs of the new home.

In contrast, YouTube is a unique way for diasporic individuals to connect to each other, and to view how some like Anuja and Hetal can adopt the traditions of the host home. This need to connect to others with a shared history and a similar culture stems from a need to be connected to the home left behind. “ShowMeTheCurry” illustrates the creation of a diasporic public through the YouTube platform, while also representing different aspects of food culture. By showing non-Indian recipes for example, the two presenters demonstrate how food culture in today’s context is also transnational, and that food, therefore, becomes a metaphor for journeys, identity and memories. As Brian Keith

Axel states, the diaspora needs to be understood in terms of “roots and origins” and the relationship between “context and archive” needs to be examined (“The Context of

Diaspora” 29). This entails the conceptualization of the present as a “repository of an authoritative knowledge of the past” (29). “ShowMeTheCurry” then encapsulates different versions of home, and reflects different origins. For example, the recipes in this channel are recipe stories, narratives that are crafted to retain the past but also to project how Anuja and Hetal, as diasporic subjects merge the past and present. Even in videos that are meant to be read as recipes, viewers can sense a feeling of nostalgia that motivates a need to archive the culinary knowledge of the past for the benefit of their own children, who will grow up in a different structure of feeling. This is a term

Raymond Williams coins to refer to a different social context, where

we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt….

We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone;

specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling

against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as though: practical consciousness

of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity. (“Structures of Feeling”

133)

In the process of becoming a part of the context of the host home, the diasporic individual, in Althusser’s13 terms, is hailed differently, and her own identity merges and eventually results in the birth of a hybrid identity. At the beginning, when she arrives in the host nation, she might be hailed as an “other” by virtue of being of a different race, by speaking English differently, and dressing differently and because of not knowing cultural references and nuances of the host country. Note the derogatory term “FOB,” or

“Fresh off the boat,” that is used to refer to “recent immigrants” (OED) who have not yet adapted to the norms of the host country, and whose cultural differences are pronounced in the context of the host country. When some of these differences start to disappear, at least to some degree, the hailing of the diasporic individual also changes. The subject might no longer interpellated as a foreigner but as someone who is, although different, more aware of the place he or she has belonged to in the past, yet one who still belongs more in the home of the present.

Anuja and Hetal’s YouTube channel serves a way for them to escape the

“othering affects” of the exterior context, and to be active and resistant within that context. This is a way of claiming space, albeit a virtual one, in a physicality where they

13 From Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (2007).

39 are part of a minority. The YouTube space privileges no particular culture and allows the diasporic individual to resist not only the forces of the host country, but also to provide a way for individuals to claim a space and cultural moment where they dictate and valorize their own cultural norms. The channel allows them to create a culinary canon, one that is a reaction against the alienating affects of the outside. “ShowMeTheCurry’s” canon of recipes provides an alternative to the “traditional” dishes of the past home, and to the

“Indian” food that is served in restaurants, and that is marketed by food companies. This culinary canon on “ShowMetheCurry” reflects a cuisine of people who reside in states of cultural in-betweenness, and uses the recipes from the home of origin, to illustrate how adaptations of original recipes take place with ingredients and tools that are found in places other than the subcontinent. Anuja and Hetal’s video database and website show not only food from India, but also food from other cultures. Alongside their recipes for

“Coconut Fish (Steamed) Indian Recipe,” they include recipes like “Masala Cornish Hen for Thanksgiving Indian Recipe,” which demonstrate the fact that they have adopted the tradition of Thanksgiving. In this digital-diasporic space, there is a presence of collages of different cuisines and traditions, since cultures always evolve and recipes keep on changing and adapting according to the cooks themselves, and according to the ingredients that are available. The users here provide only different ways of doing things, and their attempts are archived, providing audiences with an interactive access to several years’ worth of videos that show many interpretations of recipes.

For example in the recipe entitled “Ginger Cardamom Chai (Tea) Recipe,” Anuja states that “loose tea is how tea is usually sold in India,” but if this is not available, then the audience can use tea bags. Conversely, Anuja and Hetal also demonstrate adaptation

40 by using subcontinental flavors in a dish such as fondue. In “How to make Desi Fondue - an Indian Twist Recipe,” Anuja and Hetal infuse spices such as Pav bhaji masala, tandoori masala and garam masala to this dish of European origin. In doing this, the two presenters infuse “Indian” flavors to something that is European, showing how adaptations can be made not only in using ingredients available in their new home to make traditional “Indian” recipes, but that adaptations can work both ways, by ascribing something that is of European origin with “Indian” ingredients.

Anuja and Hetal play the roles of cultural archivists and curators, documenting and sharing the knowledge of food preparation, not only for their own families, but also for the YouTube sphere in general. The diasporic kitchen as mediated through YouTube takes on the task of projecting the YouTube kitchen very uniquely. In “Varan Recipe,”

Anuja and Hetal’s first video, they emulate the Socratic method. Hetal adopts the role of the “teacher” or matriarch, (even though they are peers), and Anuja, the student. For example, before they start cooking, Hetal explains why owning a pressure cooker is important. In the rest of the video, the two convey tips and tricks, and draw attention to certain aspects of the recipe through the question/ answer format. In this first recipe, as

Hetal washes the lentils, she asks Anuja why some lentils are coated with oil. When

Anuja performs the part of the ignorant student, Hetal explains it is because “A while back in India,” oil was used to ward off insects, and since “These days we don’t have this problem” any more, it is better to buy lentils that do not have a coating of oil.

When Hetal answers the question, she automatically evokes the present and “we” as being situated in North America, in her host home. “We” also alludes to the fact that she is addressing not only herself and Anuja as diapsoric subjects in Texas, but also to the

41 fact that the audiences of the channel might be of the same circumstances. She establishes a contrast and uses this teachable moment to express that the present home offers this convenient option. Another interesting aspect of these videos is that the class hierarchy and the division of labor in the subcontinental kitchen are somewhat nullified in the host home. Having domestic help in North America for example is available to a privileged few who have money to hire housekeepers. Many who are new to Canada, for example, and are starting afresh in this new context and have limited financial resources. They might have been able to have helping hands in the kitchen in their home of origin but now have to rely on kitchen appliances and convenient options to simplify the complicated recipes. For example, the basis of curry dishes needs a mixture of ground-up masala pastes, which are traditionally done fresh and by hand on a daily basis in the subcontinent. These steps lengthen the workload and the time of the recipes. After all, making the masalas by hand not only entails the physical labor of actually making the mix, but also means extra washing up of utensils. This, in my experience, is difficult to do in the diasporic kitchen in the host home, where often the kitchen itself is not outfitted with the proper division of spaces for making spice pastes and mixes and lacks the openness for the smells of frying spices to dissipate. While houses in cosmopolitan cities such as Toronto and Vancouver might be outfitted with separate “wok kitchen,” these facilities, again, might be available to those who can afford to pay for such features.

Often many new landed immigrants, such as some of my friends who have entered

Canada as “skilled workers” or international students,, have to live in apartments with only a hotplate instead of a stove or an exhaust fan and can find it difficult to satiate the cravings for the food of their birth homes.

The diasporic individual then has to adapt cooking methods to compensate for this lack of subcontinental kitchen amenities that are required for “proper” subcontinental food. So for example, Anuja and Hetal advocate the buying of a pressure cooker to save time, the use of non-stick pans to make washing up easier, and the use of a food processor to chop and grind multiple ingredients. At the end of this first video “Varan

Recipe,” Hetal evokes the past and a matrilineal link to cooking, when she states that this is a recipe that was handed down to her from her mother-in-law. This mention is not accidental, as the evocation of the mother-in-law figure provides credibility to the recipe, and method of cooking, even if some of it is taken away by setting of the American kitchen and the image of an “assimilated” immigrant.

The way the two presenters entitle their video reveals Anuja and Hetal’s intended audiences. The name, “Varan Recipe-Maharashtrian Daal (soup)” suggests a few things.

The title indicates where in India this dish originates and for viewers who might not be familiar with the term daal, the presenters equate this with soup. While the texture of the dish might resemble soup, this is not meant to be part of the same category of food as soup. First of all, soup belongs to the category of an appetizer or main course in many culinary traditions, whereas daal is meant to be an accompaniment to rice or chapatti

(bread), which is usually part of the main course. So by comparing soup and daal, the presenters cater to non-subcontinental audiences, or others who are unfamiliar with the cuisine of the subcontinent. This suggests that Anuja and Hetal perform the roles of cultural insiders, “teaching” audiences about Indian food and culture. In this way, they articulate a resistance, “writing back” to the cultural and culinary canon of a context where Indian food is often characterized as “ethnic.” “Writing back” from the YouTube

43 platform projects a domestic sphere where “Indianness” counters the cultural influences of the host home.

In “Eggplant in Exotic Indian Spices,” Anuja and Hetal introduce an Indian spicy eggplant dish, but qualify it as “exotic.” But the two presenters don’t qualify the positionality of “who” this dish is exotic to. This title again suggests that the channel is primarily meant for viewers unfamiliar with the food of the Indian subcontinent, those who would want access to all things Indian because of their “exotic” appeal. But the terming of this dish also refers to the users’ own double-consciousness. It is a comment on how Anuja and Hetal see themselves as “exotic” in the host home. On one hand, they know they are different in the host home, but what makes the word “exotic” problematic in the YouTube context is the fact that these videos will be accessed by a global audience, including those who live in the subcontinent and other diasporic individuals who might identify with Anuja and Hetal, racially and culturally. In this sense, the two

YouTubers are not only “othering” themselves, but are also “othering” other subcontinental diapsoric individuals from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. By orientalizing themselves, the two users then perform conformity, readily occupying an exoticized position.

Another interesting video is the recipe for “Egg Curry,” which itself is a symbolic dish on many levels. For one thing, it is inexpensive to make and relatively easy, requiring only the making of the “curry” sauce and the boiling of eggs. Another reason this dish is fascinating is because it is a neutral recipe, one that can be consumed by both

Hindus and Muslims, and by other cultural groups in India who adhere to a vegetarian diet. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “The Third and Final Continent” for example, the

44 narrator recounts his student and bachelor days in England where in the flat he shared with other subcontinental men, they “took turns cooking pots of egg curry” (173). The

“curry” then, is what Lahiri uses as a symbol to represent the past, and the recreation of it in the host home of the present. The dish itself is also used as a way to indicate an initial moment of arrival, when the protagonist has just landed, and still reels from the effects of alienation and nostalgia. The egg curry itself represents a kind of transient, liminal phase, a moment when one has not fully accepted the host home. Anuja and Hetal, in showing this recipe, cater to two audiences here again. One audience consists of those who are situated in a country other than the Indian subcontinent, and those who might be trying their initial experimentation with curry, and thus find it easier to invest in eggs rather than meat. But the recipes also resonate with other subcontinental subjects who have never cooked a meal by themselves in the past home. The latter audience member may also be one who is just starting out learning this complicated cuisine. And even though cooking other forms of cuisine would be easier, cooking food from the past home has a

“grounding effect” in the new home, where everything is new, including ingredients and labels in grocery stores.

What Anuja and Hetal show then, through their recipes of egg curry and eggplants, is the fact that the “traditional” can be made “simpler” in the context of the host home. While the cook might have to make certain cultural and social sacrifices while they are in the host home, food is one way to retain an allegiance to the home of the past.

And through these recipes, Anuja and Hetal advocate an “in-betweenness.” In this state of being in-between, the diasporic subject negotiates between being displaced and trying to re-home, and between clinging to the past and creating a new life, and starting afresh.

Audiences not only include those who are interested in Indian cuisine because of the “exotic” appeal it offers, but also those who might actually be situated in India, but would like to know of a simpler way to make their own familiar dishes. The interest is not predicated on the experience of making a new home, but may be more akin to the sentiments of those who view culinary adventures as tourist experiences. For example, food companies attempt to capitalize on the allure of Indian or any other type of “ethnic” food. A trip to the supermarket will show that specific aisles (mostly categorized as

“ethnic”) will house “Indian” spice mixes. Freezer sections will promise a taste of easy exoticism in the form of frozen “Chicken Tikka Masalas,” which allow the consumer to thaw, reheat and eat their way to India. And then of course, there are websites for food companies such as Betty Crocker that also offer the same promise of fantasy and exoticism through their simplified “Global” recipes, using Betty Crocker ingredients

(http://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/global-cuisine). Even cosmetic companies attempt to capitalize on this trope of exoticism, by offering products that they try to market as providing the “exotic” sensual experience of a certain place.

For example, a visit to the “Bath and Body Works” web page will list products with names such as the “Aruba Coconut” line of body lotions and mist, the “Bali Mango” and “Rio Rumberry” scrubs and shower gels. These names not only promise the exoticism as expressed through the names of these “foreign” places and the title of the page with the heading “Escape Collection: Return to Paradise,” but also equate this exoticism with the act of consuming and eating, evoking the senses of smell and tastes.

The other affect that is evoked on this page is the feeling that the present is a mundane place that calls for an escape. Visitors from countries such as India, Pakistan and

Bangladesh, when they enter the West, are bombarded with these marketing campaigns and then also learn to view themselves as exoticized beings. In this climate, a new migrant might inhabit a strange concept of selfhood, one that is created and is born from the struggles of the “othering” climate that then leads to a constant craving for the past.

“ShowMeTheCurry” then interpellates the diasporic individual through the food itself and through the medium of YouTube, which provides a safe place for viewers to retreat into, to escape the alienation of the space outside the domestic interiority. In one way, Anuja and Hetal use this platform to escape the “exoticizing” influences of the outside, and also as a way to connect to other diasporic individuals. As a result, the viewers who are also immigrants access this channel to escape their own sense of being foreign. If an audience is engaged in watching these videos, they will inhabit a mediated diasporic place and temporality. The recipes also speak to the fact that Anuja and Hetal are not only attempting to archive their own versions of subcontinental cuisines, but are also using food as a vehicle to cross the boundaries of culture and to bridge the home of the past and the home of the present. The demonstration of these recipes on the internet is a way for Anuja and Hetal to connect to others through a shared interest, by relaying the fact that food is a part of the identity that cannot be taken away in the host home. Recipes on “ShowMetheCurry” act as reminders of the past and as metaphors that help root diasporic individuals to the new setting, in the process of re-homing. Anuja and Hetal then exemplify how the diasporic domesticity can be a refuge by indulging in culinary nostalgia, and show through their YouTube videos how the food of “home” can be recreated in this diasporic space.

Chapter Two: “In-betweenness” and the Many Homes of the Diasporic Subject

An effect of living in the age of globalization is that journeys and travels, and leaving behind the “home”14 have become a necessary part of life for many. This is of course true for someone who chooses to leave the home of origin and go to a host place to start afresh and avail herself of better opportunities. But the past home is alive in memories. As a result, the diasporic individual is in a state of “in-betweenness,” always inhabiting two moments. Vijay Agnew states that the diasporic individual “who lives in the present, yet remembers the past with nostalgia, may experience a double loyalty and consciousness” (187-188). And because the home of origin is left behind but is invoked in traditions and tastes, and the new home is in the present, the diasporic subject also lives in two temporalities. The diasporic subject remembers the tastes of the home of origin and melds those with the flavors and culinary elements found in the host place. For

Anuja and Hetal, this liminal existence is demonstrated and expressed through cooking videos on “ShowMetheCurry.” I argue that their need to show Indian recipes, from their kitchen in Texas demonstrates that they inhabit two senses of home; one that belongs to the “past” and is evoked through cooking, and that of the new context of the host place.

Anuja and Hetal then incorporate the influences of India that they are familiar with into the culinary and cultural influences of their host home. Their need to cook Indian food in the American domestic space reveals that even in the context of a different culture, at

14Dunlop (2005) quotes Mohanty as exploring the location of the diasporic home. In “Defining Genealogies: Feminist Reflections on Being South Asian in North America,” Mohanty explores the notion of home: “I am convinced that this question—how one understands and defines home—is a profoundly political one….Political solidarity and a sense of family could be melded together imaginatively, to create a strategic place I could call ‘home’” (“Memoirs of a Sirdar’s Daughter” Mohanty in Dunlop 147).

48 least within their own domestic space, they choose to cook the cuisine of their home of origin. They find substitutions and make alterations, for example, using canned jackfruit instead of fresh in “Kathal (Jackfruit) Kebab Recipe - Vegetarian Kebabs” and infusing the paratha with avocados in “Avocado Paratha Recipe - Guacamole Parathas.”

The making of food videos for the two women becomes a way of documenting this “in-betweenness” and a way for them to archive adaptations and changes to

“original” recipes. Cooking becomes an example of écriture féminine. Applying the term in the way Helene Cixous15 theorizes it, though not exactly, I understand Anuja and

Hetal’s cooking as a way for them to articulate a language of cultural resistance from the hyphen. While Cixous looks at writing as a way to articulate the “body” of the woman, I look at cooking as écriture féminine, in that it is also a means to “write the body” and the history of a family in one particular time and place. The reason I compare this literary trope to cooking is because both deal with the productive labor of women.

Écriture féminine is the craft of writing, a type of writing that is particular to women, and cooking, another craft, is considered “women’s work” in the context of patriarchal systems. While cooking and writing are two different forms of labor, they are both forms of articulations and expressions of the self and the body, both requiring knowledge and study. Whereas writing entails introspection, research, time, voice and language, cooking is language in the way that it can document family history. In Baking as Biography, for example, Diane Tye explores how her mother’s collection of recipes reveals clues about her mother’s life as a wife, a member of her community and a

15 See “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976).

49 caretaker of her family. Tye justifies how recipes and cooking can be read as texts, as she states that the recipes contain “subtexts” “that offer insights not only into her life but also into the realities she shared with other women” (5). So while “writing,” in the form of autobiographies, short stories, novels, academic articles and film manuscripts, is a form of linguistic expression, given that it is privileged by virtue of being circulated in a public sphere, cooking as expression has been relegated to the private sphere. YouTube in this way is blurring this distinction of public and private, and taking this act of articulation, formerly relegated to the domestic space, and circulating it out into the public sphere. I will elaborate more on this in Chapter Four. Anuja and Hetal “write” from this “in- between” space of the public/ private and past/ present “homes,” through their cooking videos on YouTube.

As Nikos Papastergiadis states, for diasporic individuals, “Home is the centre of the world” (2). It is the center because modernity dictates that we become mobile subjects and venture outside of our particular contexts for new experiences. Yet home is the center because it is a place that contains our roots. For those who leave behind their home of origin, the home is in the past and also in the place and space of the present. In my observation of my migrant friends in Toronto, and in my own experience as an international student in Canada, I feel that anyone who moves to a new cultural context then has two homes. One that is the ephemeral and sensory place which can be conjured in the present through traditions, objects from the past home and food, and the other, the physical space that the diasporic subject can inhabit. In the physical host home, they grasp on to the past home, because it is always alive in memories, through the celebration of Eid or the Bengali New Year, for example. In this process of becoming a part of the

50 context of the host country, when the diasporic individual starts afresh and creates a domestic space that shelters and nurtures, this space also functions as a microcosm and hybrid space of the past.

Anuja and Hetal, in their work as homemakers, play this role in many senses of the word. For one thing, they are indeed making “homes.” And as I will explain in the next chapter, they create different dimensions of home, both for themselves, and for their audiences. One home is through the kitchen that is projected on the screen. The other home is the one they create for themselves and their families off-screen, a space which we as viewers cannot access but are aware of, because of the way Anuja and Hetal talk about their cooking experiences on screen. The latter is the setting for Anuja and Hetal’s nurturing work, one that is contained within the setting of Texas. In their videos, they perform the work of homemakers, giving new meaning and attention to this type work in the domestic space. They also do the work of cultural “emissaries,” as Uma Narayan terms it (1997)16 showing ways in which they keep traditions alive while they have “re- homed” in the host country. They also profess on their website to show a variety of

“Indian” recipes, including “North Indian Recipes, Punjabi Recipes, South Indian

Recipes, Gujarati Recipes, Bengali Recipes, Rajasthani Recipes, Thai Recipes, Indo

Chinese Recipes, Kerala Recipes. Our recipe videos include Vegetarian Indian Recipes,

Vegan Recipes, Healthy Indian Recipes as well as Nonveg Indian Recipes.”17 By the very fact that they promise to expose their audiences to these different varieties of cuisines from the Indian subcontinent, Anuja and Hetal show that they inhabit a cultural

16 “Through the Looking-Glass Darkly” (128).

17 http://showmethecurry.com/

51 liminality, where the influences from their home of origin meld with those of their Texas host home.

Anuja and Hetal as diasporic individuals, and the way they reach out to other diasporic individuals, demonstrate how, in this age of globalization and technological presence, online interactions can form communities. It is important to note that these

“interactions” are different than “relationships” that entail more prolonged contact. But

YouTube, through each channel and through specific videos, does provide a reference point around which conversations, debates and interactions take place through viewer comments. Not only do many people from the same cultural background seek out each other in the host home, through the “ShowMeTheCurry” YouTube channel, they also seek to connect to a broader subcontinental community. In the host home, certain cultural differences that would have been points of contention in the past home of the subcontinent, such as the clashes between Muslims and Hindus, the historical clashes between Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, almost seem to be overcome in the host country.

Census data illustrates that in Scarborough, immigrants from the subcontinent are shown to live in close proximity. A 2011 census report states that the “Top 20 Non-

Official Mother Tongue Languages” in Scarborough Village includes subcontinental languages such as Tamil, Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati and Panjabi. 18 This indicates a concentration of many groups from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Although there are distinct differences within the cuisine, culture and languages of these groups, there are also similarities, which become points of connection for immigrants from this region.

18 http://www.toronto.ca/demographics/cns_profiles/2011/pdf2/cpa139.pdf

Some sites where these different, yet culturally similar groups congregate are the specialized “Indian” grocery stores and specialized butcher shops which sell “Halal” meats and spices that are used in the cuisines of the subcontinent.19

Mosques in immigrant communities also serve as places where Muslims from particular countries can celebrate Eid and other religious holidays together. However, the opposite is also true. Cultural and religious differences might also be enhanced, and in the host home, some immigrants may only seek to connect to others of the same cultural and religious backgrounds. In any case, people from similar cultural backgrounds find ways to keep in contact with each other, to maintain a connection to the culture and traditions of the home left behind.

For Anuja and Hetal, as I read from their YouTube videos, the idea of home is multifaceted. The two, typical of diasporic individuals, inhabit a home that is “in- between” two times and spaces, and when they project their diasporic selves onto the

YouTube sphere, they create another dimension of home, a digital one, that is home in a sense that it houses their performative selves that assert their identities as they pertain to

India, the home of origin. This digital home that is a visualization of the present reality and past affects and sensibilities, connects them to other diasporic individuals. Through comments and a shared interest in similar food, they relate to others who define home in similar ways. The digital space then also becomes home, as Anuja and Hetal illustrate how the two re-home in the present by bringing forth traditions of the past. But in doing

19 In “Food and Memory,” Jon D. Holtzman (2006) cites P. Manekar’s “Gastropoetics of South Indian Diaspora” which argues that “Indian customers do not go to ethnic markets in the Bay Area simply to shop for groceries, but also to engage with representations of their (sometimes imagined) homeland” (367).

53 so, in always evoking the ways of the past home, the two presenters communicate the fact that the past is something they long for, something that is lost. But it is a home and space they try to rescue from its ephemeral place in memory by giving it tangibility, at least in the form of food, even if not immediately in the way of extended family, community or atmosphere. The “home” on the YouTube space then becomes another text, a product of the experience of living “in-between.”

There is also anxiety attached to leaving the past home. When many diasporic individuals choose to re-home, there is always a fear of being homeless, of losing touch with the past. Papastergiadis notes that “the prospects of finding the ideal home seem constantly threatened by a looming fear of living in a state of permanent homelessness”

(8). The diasporic individual, in this state of “in-betweenness,” is then constantly in a state of tension, in a tug of war of the psyche, of belonging but not quite belonging, of leaving, but needing to be grounded and rooted to the past. The anxiety stems from the fact that one home has been left behind, and the fear is the rejection from the new home and the loss of the home of origin.

As I discussed in the last chapter, the diasporic domestic space then becomes a sanctuary from the exterior openness of the host home that can “other” that individual.

The domesticity, however, while providing sanctuary and safety, can also work to further alienate the individual. The diasporic subject can retreat too much into the domestic space, and in the process of creating the past within the present, can actually lose connection with the present of the host home. In this way, the diasporic individual can inhibit her own acceptance of the host culture, allowing herself to be disconnected from her surroundings and performing a ghettoization of the self. The past home, and its

54 evocation in the domestic space of the new home can then also be an imprisoning force, one that can cage in the immigrant. For example, if a person of Indian origin in the West only cooks Indian food, and only exposes herself to Indian things and culture, and stays connected within an Indian community, she does not allow herself to be a part of the very host culture that is to be her new home. This is the “danger” that Radhakrishnan talks about, of giving into the insecurities of losing the home.

The fact that in “ShowMeTheCurry,” Anuja and Hetal can be seen making Indian food in their kitchen in Texas, speaks to the fact that the two women inhabit the sensory place of the past.20 While being firmly established in Texas, they do experiment with other cuisines, but as they emphasize on their website, they place a majority of their focus on demonstrating cuisine from the Indian subcontinent. For example in “Homemade

Curry Powder Recipe,” the two women show their viewers how to make this spice blend, emphasizing simplification and convenience. Curry powder itself is a homogenized ingredient. In the Indian subcontinent, each household has its own blend of spices, in

20 Atsuko Matsuoka and John Sorenson (2005), in talking about the Eritrean diasporas in Canada, emphasize the important role women played in creating sensory experiences that helped evoke the past home in the present. The way the women created this environment was “through the sound of their own music, the smells of familiar spices, and the tastes of traditional food” (“Ghosts and Shadows” 162). The women’s roles lay in the fact that they created comfortable spaces, a sense which was achieved through evoking the artifacts of the past and by indulging in nostalgia.

55 their own proportions, which goes into the making of curry dishes. Curry powder21 has changed, and in Narayan’s observation in Zlotnick’s work, which suggests that the

British made “curry” a part of the domestic sphere, at least in the Victorian era, it has now changed again. In North America, “curry powder” is sold in most grocery stores and has now become a “generic” ingredient in many homes. This generic store-bought blend of spices takes away from the complicatedness of making this cuisine. In Indian homes, the spice mixture that goes into curries actually consists of different spices thrown into the pot during cooking, and includes ingredients such as turmeric, coriander and cumin powders and red chili powder. And from household to household, there are varying proportions of these ingredients, along with other ingredients such as mustard seeds and fennel seeds.

The curry powder in supermarkets contains a blend of spices designed to provide the yellow color commonly associated with curries, and other ingredients that impart its smell. Curry powder takes away from the idea of diversity and the regional distinctions that are very much a part of the cuisines of the Indian subcontinent. Instead, this generic blend is found in grocery stores, and promises the “exotic” in a simple one-step way, but

21Narayan (1997) summarizes how food acts as a metaphor for the transfer of culture and identity and how traditions are passed on and reified. Her metaphor and analysis of curry powder also explain how the British identity has changed. On this similar vein, we can theorize how identity and traditions of the diasporic home can also change, and this change is also reflected through the food choices in the homes of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in the West. Narayan cites Susan Zlotnick’s idea of how curry was “naturalized and nationalized” in Victorian Britain. Zlotnick reads curry in that era as a metaphor for the connection between the Victorian ideology of domesticity and the project of colonization” (“Eating Cultures” 163-164). Narayan cites Zlotnick’s recording of this part of history by alluding to women who made curry a part of the Victorian everyday domesticity, thus nullifying “its foreign origins and represent it as purely English” (Zlotnick in Narayan 164).

56 at the cost of nullifying differences. The powder itself has then undergone a symbolic change from Victorian Britain when the spice blend was domesticated, to the present day when it is used to bring in the “exotic.” This new sense of “exoticism” that has been ascribed to the food from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh is now a selling point for many food brands, as I will explain in Chapter Four and Chapter Five.

Even as Anuja and Hetal go on to show their audience how to toast the spices, and the proportions of different seeds, they speak of the positive aspects of this or that ingredient, which usually pertains to easiness. Anuja mentions that the spice mix is convenient for “bachelors, single people or students.” In the video then, Anuja and Hetal illustrate how one can “make-do,” with ready-made curry powder mixes and invoke the tastes of the home of origin in a diasporic context. For Anuja and Hetal, the

“ShowMeTheCurry” channel on YouTube is itself a home, a metaphorical place of their own creation that includes a group of viewers who connect to each other through videos and shared interests in cooking. The audience engages through the same type of cuisine but also connects to other viewers who are also disconnected from their home of origin, and thus experience a similar need to reconnect to the past. I read the channel as a

“home,” in the way that the interactions between Anuja and Hetal and their audiences evolve around a shared nostalgia and curiosity about cooking and culture.

In the video of “Coconut Fish (steamed) Indian Recipe” for example, users comment on ways to improve the recipe. For example, the users ask questions and reply to each other but also interact with the presenters about the type of grinder used for the recipe, how to make it easier to use banana leaves and if banana leaves can’t be found, the fact that foil or parchment paper can be used as replacements. Each video is a

57 dialogue among viewers and the presenters, with food being the subject, but also providing a kind of pedagogical environment on a digital sphere that helps to make connections. This digital space becomes personal because of the way the space of the kitchen itself is personal, with either Anuja or Hetal revealing a part of one of their homes to strangers on the internet.

As I will explain later in the thesis, the image on YouTube is carefully cultivated, and reveals to the public only fragmented parts of the presenters’ domestic selves. This enmeshing of the personal and the performative also opens up different ways of communal interaction, thus creating an interesting kind of online collectivity. This communal interaction, one that is like an exercise in quilting, is something that entails the stitching together of voices, comments and ideas that make each video a unique interaction.

Anh Hua states that the act of quilting is a good way to understand the interaction that takes place within groups of women, who pick and choose parts of their historical pasts to weave together a new art. She links this activity to the work of women scholars, who also, while working on a piece of writing, “make choices about theories or aspects of theories that best suit their version of a story, or represent their perspectives and understandings of the social context in which they live. Like quilting, what is excluded in theorizing is as much an integral part of a story as what is included” (“Diaspora and

Cultural Memory” 191-192). Similarly with regard to the cooking clips as broadcast on

YouTube, the channel is, and shows, a “quilting” in many ways. The recipes themselves are each a part that make up an infinite whole. The whole of the platform, because it is regularly updated, is a pastiche of vignettes, recording and archiving the identity of the

58 presenters, and creating an impression of their home culture that is to be consumed by the audience. The pastiche is something extraordinary, one that undercuts the idea of a chronological development of the diasporic subject, since the videos themselves will not necessarily be accessed chronologically by the spectator. The “ShowMetheCurry” channel itself then is a larger narrative that tells the story of how Anuja and Hetal live in

“in-betweenness,” as they indulge in making the food from both the Indian subcontinent and the host home in the US.

But going back to Hua, Anuja and Hetal’s YouTube channel is also like a “home” in the way it provides a constant community for audiences, in terms of recipes and feedback. It is also a community and very much like the activity of quilting in the sense that it is also an activity that entails the work and participation of its viewers. Unlike the experience of reading a cookbook, the YouTube platform allows users to participate and comment on each video, which in turn, contributes to the creation of a community. I read this community of people as three- dimensional, encouraging the participation of viewers of similar origins, or those who are simply diasporic individuals in different cultural contexts. In any case, the “quilting” effect is at play not only in the way the narratives are made, but also in the way the recipes are received, connecting users from different geographical locations and different positionalities, and allowing an exchange.

The recipes in this way then extend beyond the traditional matrilineal exchange between women of one family, and instead, work both horizontally and vertically to different contact zones and moments, thus forming a somewhat amorphous yet energetic community. The community is in existence because of a shared interest in finding

“home,” and making the domestic space better through cooking. Hua states that both

59 scholarly writing and quilting provide a collaborative space that helps create an environment where the memories of the past are shared and can then highlight individual experiences and subjectivities. “Feminist scholars, like quilters, construct new stories that tell from their perspective how their lives were imbued with gender, race, and class hierarchies and testify to their resistance to varied and intersecting oppressions” (192).

Similarly, this channel and the cooking clips show how members of the audience connect to Anuja and Hetal, and why each recipe is a text that resonates with different users.

On their website for example, where audiences are given access to the same videos on their YouTube channel, viewers can connect to each other through comments and suggestions. For example, for the video on “Mexican (Spanish) Rice,” audiences interact in a conversation about ingredients and methods. “deepal” asks, “Hi Ladies, can i use fresh tomato puree or is tomato ketchup ok to use?? [I]m planning to make tis for my dinner party on tis saturday.. & i live in india..thanks…”To this, Hetal replies, “Hi

Deepal, Tomato sauce has a more concentrated flavor then fresh pureed tomatoes, but if you can’t find it, you can use the fresh ones. Do not use ketchup, the flavor is very different.”22

This interaction shows how a pedagogical exchange takes place, crossing a geographical boundary, not only through cooking videos, but also through comments.

The audience member in India is able to get her reply from Hetal, who is situated in the

US. This interaction shows an articulation from two geopolitical spaces, and from two domestic spaces, which come together on this digital plane to talk about a common

22 Comments 12-13 on http://showmethecurry.com/fusion/mexican-spanish-rice.html.

60 interest. The comments section of the video is then an in-between collaborative space that houses many individuals with their various degrees of knowledge about cooking.

Other comments under the same recipe video show how rice is also a common, yet a differently used ingredient in Indian and Mexican cuisines. “Priya” asks, “Can you please add Black bean soup recipe, or some thing that goes with [t]his mexican rice.Thanks priya.” “Priya” assumes this “Mexican rice” to belong to the same course in

“Indian” cuisine, where other dishes are served as accompaniments to rice. Anuja clarifies this distinction in her reply: “Hi Priya, This rice is served as a side, unlike Rice in Indian Food. If you go through the fusion section, we have a lot of other Mexican dishes that you can pair this with. To give you few examples: Vegetable Quesadilla, Bean

& Cheese Enchiladas, Tacos. We also have accompaniments: Guacamole, Salsa Enjoy.”23

This interaction is another example of how the YouTube sphere can be a pedagogical site, and where people who are otherwise strangers, can connect to each other over food.

Both these interactions involve a merging of different domestic spaces as the interactions connect the “homes” of the audience members, and the homes of Anuja and Hetal as they respond to comments.

Cooking on YouTube, then, in this sense is a communal affective labor that connects temporalities and geographical spaces of both the presenters and their audiences. This particular channel also presents a recording of personal history through cooking, a way to combine the work and stories of not only Anuja and Hetal, but also their matrilineal links. The videos Anuja and Hetal show, and some of the recipes they

23 See comment 19 in http://showmethecurry.com/fusion/mexican-spanish-rice.html.

61 now teach, are family recipes that have been handed down to them by their mothers and mothers-in-laws. This exchange solidifies and gives permanence to the act of cooking, to this variety of work within their family’s context in the YouTube sphere. Ingredients and methods combine on this platform, and open up dialogues that allow users from all over the world to interpret, communicate and debate about ingredients and taste adjustments.

The interactions then render these videos as texts in themselves, but they also act as points of departure that allow different texts to be produced in the form of user feedback.

The food itself that is discussed may be the topic of the text, but is also another text within the videos.

The recipe stories then bend the existing grammar, the culinary norms of the host country: acting as écriture féminine and resisting the established cultural rules and standards of the host home. The grammar dictates not only the way these dishes are conjured up in the reality of the viewers, but also how they are re-enacted in the cooking

62 process. Cooking, then, itself is an act of articulation, and the audience and its cooks, are its many authors and editors.24

But this unique type of expression, cooking, broadcasting, sharing stories and recipes, transforms and at the same time evokes a sense of the familiar that is linked to the past “home,” again, invoking, through memories, the past in the present. And what is interesting is that home is not the same place for all involved. For example, when viewers situated in India watch Anuja and Hetal’s videos, they perceive the recipes differently than when a viewer in Spain watches the videos. The debate of “authenticity” of the food shown on the channel would depend on the identity, geographical location and cultural background of the viewers. But what connects these different perspectives and places of

“home” is the fact that the nostalgia for the home is a common trope that creates another larger connection, a community. This collective longing then encapsulates another

“home,” which exists on the digital plane where Anuja and Hetal’s global reach helps connect viewers from all over the world.

24 Reshma Dunlop (2005) also states that the diasporic identity is a shared one, and that in her case, writing is a way of uniting other diasporic individuals. “Diasporic identity shifts into a home I share with other writers from multiple homelands. Within our community of shared artistic practice is a shelter of words, not reliant on national, political, ethnic, or other allegiances and categorizations. Home is in our poems, the identity of the writer shared as a way of speaking to the other across immense global and diasporic group differences, a way of speaking that has the potential to transcend what separates us” (“Memoirs of a Sirdar’s Daughter,” 115-116). Dunlop goes on to say that even though writing in English and being from another place of origin provides her “ a sense of home even through dislocation” (138). Dunlop’s view of writing then is a way to create “home.” Anuja and Hetal also create a “home” through their videos, and also provide a haven for others who are nostalgic and want to revisit the culinary offerings of the past. And like diasporic alterities, cooking and recipes also vary in their methods, from person to person. The two women express their individualities, although as a duo, in terms of cooking. Their own characters are expressed in terms of the ingredients and methods they use.

This home also becomes an extracorporeal site, where elements such as the food fuel the domesticity and bring with it inflections and aspirations of bringing back the past home into the present, rendering both viewers, and Anuja and Hetal as inhabiting a cross- cultural “in-betweenness” that exists within the virtual and the real. For example, Anuja and Hetal’s cooking is their work, and the Indian food they create, such as the “Kottayam

(Kerala) Fish Curry Recipe,” evolves the space of the Texas home into a space that honors the idea of India as a varied, multifaceted place. This recipe, for example, introduces another specific region, which is South India, and presents to the audience some of the region’s typical culinary elements, such as tamarind, coconut milk and coconut oil, rather than vegetable oil, as the cooking medium. Audiences who are unfamiliar with the cooking of South India will gain a sense of difference in flavors from cooking from other Indian regions. The “in-betweenness” that Anuja and Hetal then inhabit not only the reflects cuisine of the specific spaces of India that they are both from, but on the YouTube sphere, the “home” of India entails the whole country and its various regions. So the “in-betweenness” works not only in the way of living between the cultural influences of the US and India, but also an identification with the broader category of

India.

In this “in-between” diasporic space, the concept of the abject25 is also pertinent.

This is the home that is lost, and is also rejected, not by the first generation of immigrants

25 Julia Kristeva, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982) defines the abject as anything that is outside the subject’s symbolic order. When faced with the abject, the subject encounters trauma. In my analysis, I apply Kristeva’s concept to the way immigrants from the subcontinent sometimes are viewed, and view themselves and aspects of their cultural identities that do not fit into the Western context.

64 who had once upon a time lived in the original homeland, but by their children, who have different concepts of home. To this generation, the original home of the parents is an obligation that has to be fossilized in memory and a place that has to be kept alive through traditions. It is a place that has only something to do with their genealogy, but not much to do with their everyday materiality and existence. A second generation

Bangladeshi for example might be obliged by her parents to celebrate occasions such as

Eid or the Bengali New Year in the West, even if she does not feel a connection to the place. The parents’ home in Bangladesh is an abstract entity, an idea and space that has little to do with her own everydayness. But her parents’ home of origin is one that she knows she must be connected to, one that she knows only abstractly, maybe on infrequent trips, but mostly through its everyday evocation through food and other such sensory presences in her daily life. Similarly, India to the children of Anuja and Hetal, then, is evoked through tastes. The link to India to this generation of people then is preserved through the matrilineal linkages which are maintained through food. Food then becomes stories and texts, which might sometimes be rejected in the context of an American home, given that the doubly-conscious identity of the second generation has more of a cultural allegiance to the place of birth than their parent’s host home. For example, this second generation prefers to blend in, in the face of contrasts between the Western outside and the Indian domesticity. The dichotomy that is inherent in the perception of self is also what informs their cultural division. The second generation is torn between two worlds, but because the host home of their parents is what they most identify with, this will sometimes entail these second generation children adhering to the tastes and senses of their peers, who are embedded in the West.

But little do these children know, or understand, the connection and loss their parents feel to their grandparental home. The struggles of these two generations are different, and the children often don’t understand what it means to find the world within the home, and the home within the world.26 These children will never fully understand the experience of immigration or adopting a new home. The second generation will never really understand what it is like to experience longing for a home that is so far away. The home and the world then collide, and so do identities, and perceptions of selves and spaces. Between the home and the world, there is a gulf that works to entrap the two generations and two spaces, in what Bhabha terms as “ideological contradiction” (“The

World and the Home” 144). The choice comes down to belonging not only to one between the home and the world, where the influences of the host home compete with the values of the past home, but to the second generation, this becomes a choice between the home or the world. Their parents’ “home” exists in their reality through food and traditions which must be sacrificed so that they can live in the present, in the culture and home in the West that they were born in. Diasporic individuals then feel the pressure to belong to one or the either, and not both, since belonging to one place would mean infidelity to the other home.

A typical example of this contention is to be found in the way meals are considered and prepared in the host home. The meals, for example, that subvert the hierarchy of the kitchen space in the home of origin, also beg different methods of preparation. For example, the occupants of the diasporic kitchen do not have access to

26The Home and the World (1916) by Rabindranath Tagore deals with the theme of a clashing of ideologies, with the exterior and interior of “home.”

66 traditional tools such as the stone grinder or “a blade that curved like the prow of a

Viking ship” (Lahiri “Mrs. Sen’s” 114). One must adapt and find convenient substitutes to make up for this lack. This is the interpretative sacrifice the cook has to make in reading the recipes from the home of origin. Spices are milder than one might be used to, cooking is simpler and easier and somehow in this process, the dish is different than the original as one might remember. But also the magic of traditions that is attached to the original dish is somewhat lost. In the YouTube sphere, Anuja and Hetal also work to bring back some of the traditions, and in this process perform the act of cooking as an act of resistance against the culinary norms of the host home.

However, in projecting “home” through these recipe videos from their diasporic kitchen, Anuja and Hetal conceptualize not only a place that is familiar to them, but further, try to portray an image that plays into the “exotic” appeal and an image of the

Western perception of their homeland. Recipes often have titles such as “Glimpses of

India: Malabar Parotta,” or “Eggplant in Exotic Indian Spices,” for example, that speak to the fact that the presenters wish to represent the “exotic” in relation to the food of their home of origin and wish to show to the YouTube sphere the different regions of India. In

“Glimpses of India: Malabar Parotta,” the video shows a vendor in India making the popular yet complicated street food, using layers of flatbread dough, piling them on, tearing them apart, layering with ghee and then finally frying them. The presenters aim to take their viewers on culinary journeys to India, thus ascribing “exoticism” to India, as they name some their recipes with the use of this word. Perhaps in this “in-between” space, Anuja and Hetal also succumb to their double-consciousness, to portray their own culture as “exotic.”

“Home,” then, as Anuja and Hetal show, is mediated and embroiled in the senses.

This is why the very act of cooking is an act and part of homemaking. The new home must have the sensory inflections of the past home, through food, tastes and smells. The homes that belong to Anuja and Hetal are invariably rooted in the hybridity of the self and environment. The homes are also very distinct from the ideas of the home of the past, which revel in traditions and ceremony. But in evoking the past in the present, Anuja and

Hetal create another “home” that is defined by the work of homemaking, and makes connections between other diasporic homemakers. Anuja and Hetal then live in an ephemeral state of “in-betweenness” in their own domestic space and also through the space they project on YouTube. In this process they reach out to a larger diasporic public, which renders their channel and audience as another diasporic yet digital “home.

Chapter Three: YouTube as Heterotopia: Embedded Spaces and Subjectivities

The YouTube channel “ShowMetheCurry” is a space within which there are concentric spaces, and in these spaces, the idea of home is embedded in many layers. In a way, the YouTube platform and the channel itself are heterotopic,27 where the different spaces work together to define the lived experience of many diasporic individuals. The embedded digital and real spaces take on a heterotopic quality where the platform and video texts can render diasporic subjects as being in a liminal temporality and home space. The kitchen Anuja and Hetal project on YouTube is a demonstration of how

“home” works as a space within a space, where the virtual, real and ghostly presence of the past connect the affective version of “home.”

The first space projected on the computer is the actual domestic space and kitchen in the home that Anuja and Hetal film their videos in. Another home is the ghostly presence of the past home, in the way the traditions and culinary ways of the Indian subcontinent are invoked in the videos. This makes Anuja and Hetal’s projected kitchen an “in-between” home, as I have previously discussed, one that resides within both the context of their host home, and the idea of the past home of India, through memories and culinary nostalgia. This ghostly presence is not a space in itself, but the idea that injects the present space of the host home. Another space that the videos address is that of the audience’s own private space, the home in which the viewers access the videos. I argue

27 Michel Foucault (1986) explores the idea of spaces and the relationship between subjectivity and spaces. He describes a heterotopia as a contrast to utopias. Heterotopia is characterized as spaces “that have the curious property of being in relation with all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate mirror, or reflect” (“Of Other Spaces” 24).

69 that these different layers render YouTube as a heterotopia,28 a real and imaginary space that connects and informs identities, diasporic alterities and homes. To the audiences not familiar with the cultural nuances and traditions of India, these recipes reflect an

“exoticization” through the region’s culinary elements, and in turn, might portray a one- dimensional image that hardly represents other versions of the place that are a part of the socio-economic reality of the subcontinent.

The recipe videos evoke domesticities of the home and the culinary practices of this past that are not performed in the present of the host home. For example, Anuja and

Hetal, in “Homemade Rasam Powder Recipe,” start the video by reading the recipe, which is sent by a viewer. Anuja reads the viewer’s email which states the recipe is one which she uses because the packaged “Rasam” powders she buys in the stores do not have any flavor. The email also states that the recipe is not the viewer’s own, but “her mom’s and granny’s.” Anuja mentions in the video how the viewer makes the recipe and distributes it among her friends. The video here demonstrates how tradition is part of the present, and again stresses the importance of the matrilineal connection in the exchange of recipes. The connection to India in this example is

28 William Uricchio (2009) in “The Future of a Medium Once Known as Television” suggests that the television might be heterochronic, a term that Foucault used to define his fourth principle of a heterotopia. While Foucault states that heterochronies demonstrate “slices of time,” (26) Uricchio applies this term to illustrate how television, because it “is a space of accumulated artifacts that are endlessly recombinatory,” illustrates the concept of heterochronies. While Uricchio does not clearly define YouTube as a heterotopia, Peters and Seier note, in discussing a video of a teenager’s bedroom on YouTube as a heterotopia, because “they might be understood as equally private and public, actually existing and utopian, performative and transgressive spaces” (199).

70 materialized through memories of food and culinary traditions. I would argue that the recipe itself is a metaphor for “home” which includes a desire to inhabit a maternal space, in the way Papastergiadis theorizes, both in the political and personal senses. 29 Anuja and Hetal attempt to evoke India by conjuring up recipes that have been written and made by not only their own “mothers and grandmothers,” but also through recipes that contain the maternal influences of their audience members. By projecting this suggested recipe from a member of their global audience, Anuja and Hetal make several connections; one linking their own domestic space through their YouTube channel, and another, by invoking a part of the viewer’s own matrilineal link and projecting it to the audience.

The spaces and temporalities that are projected include Anuja and Hetal’s own private space of the kitchen, the space of the member of the audience whose culinary practices are “inherited” from her mother, along with the audience’s interest in cooking and their own domestic spaces where the YouTube video is accessed. In this way,

YouTube juxtaposes times and spaces, linking audience, performer and subject in this heterotopic space.

29 Nikos Papastergiadis (1998) notes contradictorily that “Modern nostalgia is not a wish to return to the mother’s womb. The answer to the dilemma of the migrant experience is not just to pack up and go home. Few who have left their native village and headed to the foreign city retain the illusion of a triumphant return. It is not just a chilling thought that their place of origin will have changed, leaving them with the sense that they are still out of place, but there is also the wish to claim something for themselves within the new city” (“The Home in Modernity” 10-11).

What is interesting is how these versions of “home” that are connected through

YouTube are laced with different types of affects: for example nostalgia30 that motivates the publication of the “ShowMetheCurry” channel, and depending on the audience, fantasy and adventure. There is also a temporal relationship here. One temporal connection is between Anuja and Hetal and their culinary traditions that make their way from the past in India to the present domesticity in Texas. Another temporal connection deals with the audience’s interaction with Anuja and Hetal’s videos. Because there is a difference between the date of publication and date of access, the audience can encounter the domestic spaces of the presenters at different moments in time, without any kind of chronological access. This is also similar to how a heterotopic space functions, as a juxtaposition of temporalities, and also in the way the audience’s moment of watching the videos merges with the moment that is projected on screen.

As Rushdie states in Imaginary Homelands, the past is conjured up and colored, seen more clearly, with details embellished through memory (9).31 Culinary traditions of the past home reside in memory, and are romanticized through Anuja and Hetal’s cooking videos. By enacting some of these recipes, Anuja and Hetal combine their two

30 Papastergiadis (1998) states, “The significance of traditions was found in the extent that they enable individuals to connect their identity within a time-space continuum. Traditions are forms for the articulation of memory and meaning” (“The Home in Modernity” 8). This sense of homelessness for the immigrant subject is the fear of not being able to belong to the host home, but also a fear of not being able to belong to the past home either. This is what perhaps motives the diasporic individual to hold on to memories and traditions of the past, even though the things they hold on to might actually change in the past home. The immigrant individual is then an archivist of culture. 31 Anita Mannur (2010) echoes how in Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie talks about how “nostalgia intervenes to colorize, or, in this case, decolorize, the past, reducing it to a pale imitation of what it might have been to the mind’s eye” (28).

72 homes within the space of their YouTube videos. As a result, the global YouTube sphere learns about the “exotic” richness of the subcontinental culinary corpus of India through videos on “ShowMetheCurry.” Moreover, when diasporic subjects speak of their home of origin, they do so through a romantic lens, usually bordering on the fantasy mediated by nostalgia. Anita Mannur in Culinary Fictions, in her discussion about food in subcontinental diasporic writing, echoes Rushdie’s ideas about the distortive power of memory. She makes a distinction between two types of memories. Some are

“remembered, while others, literally are re-membered” (28). The “re-membering” she discusses refers to the way certain moments of the past are given a new affective layer of meaning, as these moments are conjured up in the present moment. She alludes to the concept of remembering and the way memories and stories also give life to an idea of home that is separate from the host home. Food is linked to memory, for example in the way certain dishes are served during Eid or Christmas dinner, and when Anuja and Hetal articulate recipes, they re-member that particular dish by re-placing the dish from the context of the past to the reality of the present. In this case, the food, through memory, represents a link between the two homes of the past and present.

An example of this is in their video “Kathal (Jackfruit) Kebab Recipe -

Vegetarian Kebabs.” The two presenters explain what jackfruit is, and the fact that the fruit can be tedious to work with. And because the availability of the fruit in its fresh form is limited in the North America, Anuja and Hetal recommend using a canned version to make the dish. This demonstrates adaptation and interpretation, and the fact that the taste can be replicated maybe not exactly, but conveniently in the host home.

The YouTube sphere allows the user to interact with different affects—longing, excitement, curiosity, happiness—and indulge in fulfilling a desire for nostalgia. This way, YouTube recipes provide a means of recognition for the audience member who is able to identify with the image and message of the YouTube presenter. The idea of the subcontinental home as an “exotic” entity also informs how many audience members from India then misrecognize themselves through the heterotopic space of the videos on the “ShowMetheCurry” channel. They begin to see themselves as “exotic.” Similarly, the

YouTube sphere also makes it possible for the viewer to identify herself with sentiments reflected in the recipe stories. For example, the recipes themselves signify a longing for a lost past “home,” a way for them to connect over a feeling of loss, and in this way, they inevitably create a community of people who are similarly living in-between two cultural influences.

The space of the kitchen in the new home, for Anuja and Hetal, is different than what is/was in the past home. The two women instead use kitchen gadgets that are

“Western,” and simplified techniques. For example, they use coffee grinders instead of mortars and pestles to grind spices (Garam Masala Recipe - Indian Spice Mix) and use canned substitutes where fresh counterparts are unavailable. While this is true that some of these substitutions have made their way into homes in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as well, these adaptations in general speak to the fact that globalization and modernity now dictate simplification of the traditional. The alterations that are made to “simplify” recipes make it easier for audiences, who are new to countries in the West, to recreate the familiar dishes that Anuja and Hetal demonstrate through their recipes. The diasporic kitchen then produces this adaptation and transformation of the food from the past home.

The act of cooking, as I will explain in the next chapter, is also redefined, since the triviality of the activity is shed, and cooking instead becomes agency and a means of articulating personal history and presence. In the American diasporic home, Anuja and

Hetal render cooking as an articulation of identity, an assertion of agency and a voice articulating resistance, but also acceptance and adaptation. The site of the kitchen is then an empowering location, one that subverts the class biases often associated with kitchen work in India. The difference is the treatment of the host and past homes in the diasporic family’s tendency to also carry over traditions and structures of the past and present. One example of this is how many older generation of immigrants may attempt to enforce the past home’s values on their children. Anuja and Hetal make their videos, as I have mentioned before, to be a repository of recipes for their children, who they want to be able to retain, at least the culinary traditions of India (“Show Me the Curry's Suji Halwa

Dessert Recipe”). But as R. Radhakrishnan states, this creates a conflicted generational relationship within this third space. He states that the first generation of immigrants can never really realize what it is to be a hybrid, to grow up with the influences of two cultures (“Is the Ethnic ‘Authentic’ in the Diaspora?” 206). This alludes to the fact that the first generation cannot really understand the tension of being forced to practice two cultures, and racisms and discriminations the second generation will feel in the host country. To the second generation, the concept of the host country is also something problematic, since their host and home country are the same, and the parental past home is a land that is abstract. India exists somewhat in the imagination, memories and in stories, but was never a part of the embodied reality of the second generation.

The diasporic viewers, and Anuja and Hetal who are also diasporic subjects on screen, inhabit a fantasy that is predicated upon not being able to live in a place that is vivid and romanticized in the past. While many first generation immigrants leave the past home for better opportunities and types of freedom they would not have in their own motherland, the distance, both temporal and spatial, makes the past an unattainable romantic plane. Radhakrishnan alludes to the fact that India is also romanticized by the diasporic subject and that this idealization clouds the reality of the present political original home (“Is the Ethnic ‘Authentic’ in the Diaspora?” 211). So according to him, the version of liminality that the diasporic subjects are embedded in tilts more to the past, a fictionalized version of it. On YouTube, Anuja and Hetal perform ignorance. While they do only focus on demonstrating recipes, and in doing so want to keep the past alive in the present, they do so by failing to talk about the political present of the Indian subcontinent. Even on a food channel, it is not impossible to bring in contemporary issues that plague the region. They might, for example, talk about religious clashes that occur in

India between Hindus and Muslims, and use their platform as a way to talk conscientiously and alert their global audience about the issues that are a part of the political present in the different regions of the Indian subcontinent. But the recipe stories are a way for them to adhere to a pleasant and fictionalized version of the past that is far removed from the present.

Another way the videos operate is by reassigning images and representations of the subcontinent to the YouTube public. The romanticization of the past home translates onto the YouTube sphere as a performance of exoticization to “ShowMetheCurry” audiences. The recipes deal with spices and flavors, and “ShowMetheCurry” itself

76 operates to “exoticize” India. This image of the exotic India for example, is in contradiction to the actual reality of the country in the present moment. Mark Liechty discusses the fact that when travelers travel, they do so with an imagined perception of the place they are visiting, which is informed through “commercial mass media”

(“Kathmandu as Translocality” 113). YouTube projects diasporic subjects who talk about the longing for a lost home, and in this way, it reaffirms the way other viewers imagine the subcontinent. Thus, YouTube fuels the idea of this image-making machine and creates an imaginary land, which might not really include all aspects of the real place. For subcontinental diasporic subjects, the imagined subcontinent is a mixture of what they know it to be because of current images and perceptions of the land, as well as images that are created through figments of their own memories and imagination, and through the stories they have heard from family members. In my reading of these YouTube videos, this image then contains an idea of a place that is reified, and is disconnected from the idea that the India in the present is different.

The imaginary place on the digital plane that is articulated through memory clashes with multiple voices and multiple versions of the same place. So while

“ShowMetheCurry” advocates the romantic version of the Indian subcontinent, there are other images that circulate on news channels on YouTube and on the Internet in general that offer a variety of perspectives about the Indian subcontinent. These provide different layers of a place that is presented to YouTube audiences. In addition, cookbooks such as

The Complete Asian Cookbook and Madhur Jaffery’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking promise cultural richness, decadent flavors and complex tastes, whereas images of a

77 garment factory collapsing in Bangladesh highlight the poverty and exploitation that are a part of the harsh reality of the majority of the people of the region.

Although ignoring the clash between the fantastic and realistic images of the subcontinent, Anuja and Hetal work to show their own space in the host home as a hybrid space that merges recipes from India with ingredients from their host country. For example, there are recipes for “Quinoa Polao,” an “Indian-American” take on a subcontinental dish that is traditionally cooked with rice. This is an example of hybridity, as the two presenters alter the traditional “rice” recipe to cater to audiences in the West who are interested in incorporating quinoa into their diet. The YouTube hosts also show recipes that are a part of American culture, and are influenced by other cultures. “Mango

Salsa” speaks to the “Tex-Mex” influences of the West, whereas the “Thai Thom Ka

Soup” and Polish “Zapiekanka” reflect the “multicultural” palate of the host home. These recipes then reflect the fact that Anuja and Hetal’s identities are not only Indian, but have been hybridized and influenced by the cultural elements that surround them in the host country. The idea of their identity, as communicated through YouTube, is that the users are in a place of liminality, constantly being surrounded by different elements, and being absorbed by them as well. The place that is projected on YouTube is then one which merges these differences into a multi layered cultural place that shows that the new home now does not only mean allegiance to one culture. The Thai and Mexican recipes these users include in their archive of videos indicate that Anuja and Hetal incorporate into their daily lives elements of the host home that to them are culturally different. But showcasing the videos of food from their home of origin, and by showing recipes that they find interesting but belong to other cultures, the presenters define the “exotic” as

78 being a part of the cultural elements that are not really a part of the Western mainstream, but are a part of the culture of a visible minority in the West. “ShowMetheCurry” blurs the distinctions between the imaginary and real, providing a platform for open dialogue and a negotiation of the place in fantasy and the place in reality.

In explaining the dichotomy created by the real and imagined spaces of a particular place, Mark Liechty also talks about the problems that arise from this “in- between” space in the context of Nepal. He states that the media representations of Nepal inform how citizens view not only their own nation, but also themselves as citizens of the world. While YouTube and mainstream media fuel romantic versions of the subcontinent, in playing what Uma Narayan terms the missionary role,32 the state constructs itself as a stigmatized, marginalized present, that in turn makes its citizens see themselves as “Third

World” marginalized citizens (Liechty 119). Since modernity is a “foreign commodity,”

Nepali youths see themselves as being “on the margins” because of the global “rhetoric of backwardness, development, foreign aid and education, which propel Nepali youths to position themselves ‘on the margins’ of a meaningful universe as consumers of an externally generated material modernity” (119). The exoticized version of India that is circulated by Anuja and Hetal on YouTube creates a double-consciousness in subcontinental diasporic subjects that aims to make them think of themselves as “exotic” subjects in the context of the host home, as demonstrated in the way they title some of their recipes, for example, “Eggplants in Exotic Indian Spices.” Being a part of “India”

32 Uma Narayan (1997) makes a distinction between the emissary and missionary roles of diasporic women. She states that the “missionary position” is a role that “constructs Third-World individuals in general as missionaries, with the mission of rescuing Westerners from their negative stereotypes and attitudes toward Third-World cultures and contexts” (“Through the Looking Glass” 133).

79 also creates a heterotopic effect, where subjects of non-Western origin like Anuja and

Hetal view themselves as different in the West. But diasporic subjectivity is also influenced by the one’s own preconceived ideas about the host home.

One example of how images of the host home inform the diasporic subject’s own ideas about place before she arrives in the host country is through food from the host land that she buys in the past home. For example, Anita Mannur, in reading the Australian Sri

Lankan diasporic novel Change of Skies by Yasmine Gooneratne, talks of how the female protagonist Jean “negotiates” her sense for loss of her Sri Lankan home, and the assimilation into the Australian context. Mannur reads Jean’s kitchen “as a space to negotiate her in-betweenness; a ‘brown’ space in the terms that Richard Rodrigues has used—a space of admixtures, new creations, and fusions” (60). By buying Australian ingredients to create the food of her home of origin, Jean is reclaiming cultural agency, and speaking through her own cultural mode, rather than completely assimilating to the host home. In Anuja and Hetal’s case, while using American ingredients to make Indian food might be an articulation of resistance, it is also a way to contribute a voice to a diasporic culinary corpus. Anuja and Hetal similarly work to exercise resistance by articulating their culture through food. By cooking “Bengali Mustard Fish Curry” for example, their message to their audience is that even in the Western host home, the two women continue to cultivate their domesticities according to the ways and many cultural influences of the Indian subcontinent.

YouTube therefore acts as a “third-space” in Bhabha’s terms, 33 where the publicity of the private self provides a site for ambivalent connections between Anuja and

Hetal and their audiences, and projects a juxtaposition of images on one particular place.

The YouTube sphere is a meeting place, a collective of other diasporic selves that make this sphere a heterotopic “imagined community,”34 where a shared interest in cooking and

“Indian” food creates an interactive online community. The knowledge of food and its ontology acts as a way to form this community. While Anuja and Hetal live within the hyphen, they also rupture this hyphen through YouTube, by sharing this digital domestic space with the masses. The YouTube platform allows there to be an interaction between two sides of the host home and past home.

What makes YouTube a form of heterotopia is the dimension of the audience’s own space and subjectivity. The reason that YouTube audiences would access these videos and recipes is because they would have an interest in subcontinental culture to begin with. The idealized and romanticized India would then also feed into the Western public perception of India as an “exotic” landscape, with “exotic” food and colorful spices and flavors. Anuja and Hetal then re-circulate this rhetoric of the “exoticism” of

India, orientalizing the region, and themselves further, and perpetuating this idea of the

“exotic.” Aside from the way home and space are projected through YouTube, there is also the issue of how this digital space is accessed in the audience’s own domestic space.

33 The term third space is a concept developed by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994) that defines a place of in-betweenness that deems postcolonial subjects as hybrids. I use this term to talk about the liminal states of diasporic subjects, as these individuals too are in a liminal space of two homes, and two temporalities.

34 See Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991).

Because YouTube is designed as participatory media, and the videos are to be accessed at the user’s own convenience, place takes on a layered quality. YouTube simultaneously operates as an audience space and a performance space. The platform allows both

YouTube spectators and the presenter to inhabit a moment where both can interact either instantly and simultaneously, or at different temporalities. For example, the digital archive of YouTube allows access to videos from several years before the present. As a result, the YouTube audience can access and experience Anuja and Hetal from about six years ago. The temporal distance is important here because the audience can relive past moments with the presenters and can also bear witness to the changes that take place over the course of years within these videos.

The difference in time and random access format of the YouTube platform allows the audience to witness different ways that Anuja and Hetal change over the course of their YouTube careers. For example, there is a noticeable change, as I have mentioned previously, in the way the first video portrays a teacher-student dynamic between Anuja and Hetal, and in the rest of their videos. This dynamic disappeared by the second video, but audiences can note other differences, such as the title music that has changed several time since the first video in 2007, and even renovations to their kitchen space. Viewers can also keep track of other moments in the presenters’ lives, such as their vacations to India and other countries, which they also document through recipe videos. The “ShowMetheCurry” channel then demonstrates a juxtaposition of temporalities and spaces.

Moreover, within the audience’s space of access, there is a “voyeuristic separation” (Mulvey) 35 that happens in a theatre that does not apply to watching videos on YouTube, or on a personal computer. Because the personal computer has made watching videos an isolated experience, there is no need for separation between viewers, since watching videos on the computer in this way does not require a sharing of physical space. In the context of YouTube, the experience of watching is isolated. The videos are to be consumed quickly and in the privacy of one’s own space. What the viewers experience is an indulgence of their voyeurism and clear intent of looking in on someone’s private world. There is no shame attached here, of intruding and being a witness to a stranger’s inner domesticity. YouTube has thus changed the way we think of privacy, and is also a reflection of how identity and domesticity have become subjects to be consumed. YouTube points to the user’s own desire for other types of knowledge and also offers up in its archive of videos, access to other users and other contexts that might pique the interest of an audience member. The way the audience chooses to view a video is then not only a reflection of a desire, in this case a “double-edged” desire for both the exoticism and familiarity of the past home, but also explains the existence of the broad spectrum of videos on different topics and people.

In analyzing the way YouTube audiences choose to view particular videos, the question in this case very well may be whether or not there is anything called random.

35 According to Mulvey (1989), the darkness of the theater and the play of light and shadows from the screen isolate one viewer from each other, and the viewers from the action on the screen (“Visual Pleasure” 17). The separation that results from darkness and light in a theatre is extended on the YouTube sphere where the voyeuristic separation also occurs because of the difference in time between the time of the recipe video’s publication, and the time of the viewer’s access.

But the choices a user makes in terms of choosing to view specific videos is also an articulation of the subjectivity of the user. This makes YouTube a heterotopia given that the platform is able to subvert notions of the public and private, and provides a juxtaposition of times and spaces.36

Anuja and Hetal, by projecting the space of a part of their home, make public a part of their private world, blurring the boundary between the private and public sphere.

They broadcast it out to the public through YouTube, projecting, from the very personal domain of the kitchen, a hybrid cultural identity that speaks to the way traditions are changing. Instead of kitchen work being relegated to the domestic space, they create a public and global archive of their everyday work within the home space. As Hetal notes in a video, as she and Anuja demonstrate a recipe for “Sheera,” an Indian sweet dish, the

YouTube videos act as a diary of sorts, so that one day her daughter can learn cooking, techniques and traditions. “Whatever my daughter gets, it won’t be just from me, it will be something that is passed on from me, from my mother and from my grandmother”

(“Show Me the Curry's Suji Halwa Dessert Recipe”). The videos she and Anuja make are then a way to preserve their stories that can be easily accessed not only by members of their families, but also by the public. The YouTube sphere is then a collection of moments, in that the particular image of a place in a particular time is frozen and archived.

36 Foucault (1986) in his “third principle” of a heterotopia, states that “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (25).

Time and space are a part of how identity can be represented and interpreted. Not only is identity linked to place, but as Radhakrishnan states, it is linked to the temporality that the subject is embedded in, similar to what Raymond Williams terms as the

“structure of feeling” (“Negotiating Subject Positions in an Uneven World” 123).

Subjectivity is influenced by not only a person’s geographical, gendered or sociological environment, but also that person’s interactions within this “structure of feeling.” For diasporic individuals of different generations, this means varied experiences and degrees of allegiance, in terms of how they identify with either the host home, or the home of origin. In this way for example, a first generation immigrant from India might have a different experience and a more distanced allegiance to the host home, whereas for the second generation, this allegiance might be inverted. The interactions that take place between Anuja and Hetal and their audiences are also different, in the sense that Anuja and Hetal, embedded in this time of the publication of their videos (2007-present) in

Texas may be interpreted differently as texts to their global audiences, who can access them at any moment. The YouTube audience then can have debates and be hostile about how “authentically” Anuja and Hetal portray particular recipes. While for some audiences, the question of authenticity might not be at play while they view these recipes, for others, “authenticity” might be a sensitive issue when they see Anuja and Hetal, as coming from the same place of origin, showing particular ways of making these recipes.

In their recipe entitled “Kottayam (Kerala) Fish Curry Recipe,” a viewer, “Anu Nair” states, “I am from kottayam, and we never made a fish curry like this. It's not a kottayam style fish curry.”

This comment illustrates the fact that “Anu Nair” is not impressed at Anuja and

Hetal’s attempt at making this particular dish, which claims to be from this particular place in Kottayam, and is instead seeking “authenticity.” The audience member is critical and does not forgive the fact that Anuja and Hetal attempt to make this dish in their

Texas setting. This interaction also illustrates how viewers also have expectations when they venture onto a channel like “ShowMetheCurry,” which promises, (through its channel title and descriptions), recipes of Indian origin. Viewers who are located in India, then, expect the channel to “mirror” their own knowledge of the culture and context of

India.

Applying Foucault37 and his characterization of a heterotopia, the videos can be read as reflections in a mirror, albeit a virtual one. And while YouTube may reflect performative selves of presenters, instead of the presentation of their “real” selves, the video stories do in fact show the experiences of everyday life. The presenters themselves are subjects, and can see themselves on YouTube, which then renders this digital medium a mirror. Anuja and Hetal perform through this medium and their “real selves” can then be perceived as the images on screen as reflection. This idea is also echoed by Gionanna

Fossati, who characterizes YouTube as a “mirror maze,” and states that, “Finding the way out of the mirror maze is as difficult as not clicking the mouse for the next clip, the next mirror” (460-461). So while Anuja and Hetal’s channel may be a “mirror” that sets up the

37 Because the YouTube sphere offers reflection of a desire, in this way, it acts as a mirror. Foucault (1986) compares heterotopia to a mirror. “The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order for it to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there” (“Of Other Spaces” 24).

86 expectation among their viewers about reflecting “Indian” cuisine, viewers can also browse from “mirror” to “mirror,” by navigating other channels which promise a similar cultural reflection.

To relate this to the diasporic context, every video that the diasporic subject chooses to view says something about the type of food and cultural practices that make up their background. It also relates to the way these immigrant subjects express their tastes and culture. Without really actively connecting to the larger community,

YouTubers can still relate to other members who have a shared identity in some way, whether it be a shared diasporic identity, or a shared sub-continental immigrant cultural identity, or just a shared and general interest in similar food and traditions. The ways of connecting on YouTube then become fluid, and interests, identities and cultures intersect.

YouTube in this case then acts as a heterotopia, bringing in a virtual place and presence in a reality where stories and affects of nostalgia and desire overlap on one platform. This virtual place of “ShowMetheCurry” channel works to build an online community.

Patricia Yaeger notes that in today’s transnational context, the idea of “bounded communities and localities” may no longer be applicable (“Introduction” 17). Since globalization has unified culture in many ways, it means that groups of people can no longer be identified so strictly according to cultural norms and traditions. This means that the idea of space is no longer the same, and the relationship that community and identity have to geographic space is in a state of flux, mainly because of the movement and mediation of culture through technology. For the relationship that “ShowMetheCurry” cultivates with its audience, the community that forms is not one based on physical space, but rather on the sharing of similar sentiments of being far away and longing for home.

“ShowMetheCurry” in this way can be read as a transnational fluid “community,” which consists of audiences from India and elsewhere who are interested in the kind of food that

Anuja and Hetal show on their channel.

YouTube is an alternative or changing public sphere that does not really adhere to the Habermasian “critical-rational” definition, but incorporates the “playfulness and affect that characterize the ‘common culture’” (Burgess and Green 103). YouTube allows for viewers from all parts of the world to engage in interactions, and this engagement is not dependent upon race, class and gender. The idea of “rationality” is not a criterion for a public gathering of sorts on YouTube, given that much of the content on this digital sphere is published based on its utter meaninglessness. If the bourgeois public sphere also affords political power to its participants on this “democratic” public forum, YouTube offers more of this freedom, given that the Internet is vast and is therefore difficult to monitor, and is accessible to a global audience.

YouTube also acts as a heterotopia in the way it juxtaposes the traditional forms of oral storytelling within a new technological environment. This way, YouTube has changed the way we communicate and has put the focus back on “phatic”38 communication. John Hartley notes that the medium of YouTube “may also be restoring an ancient multi-voiced mode of narration to cultural visibility” (137). He thus alludes to the fact that this very democratic nature of YouTube has nullified all elements of hierarchy that decides what art is. YouTube allows us to go back to earlier versions of communication and storytelling, by reassigning the privilege that is ascribed on the

38 Also known as “small talk.”

“critical-rational” nature of information, to raw, phatic39 communication that is a part of ancient forms of storytelling. When Anuja and Hetal talk about their food, they tell stories of recipes and traditions of their past. While mediated through technology, this format does bring back importance to basic forms of verbal storytelling. The heterotopic

YouTube sphere then destroys hierarchies in what are considered to be traditional

“critical-rational” subjects of discussion in the public sphere. YouTube allows for a blurring of genres of reality and performance, where Anuja and Hetal’s recipes tell us significant stories about their past home and present reality. A re-privileging of verbal communication allows the distance between the private and public realms to be reduced.

“ShowMetheCurry” privileges recipe stories and brings them to the attention of the public. These “stories” comprise processes and tales of everyday tasks such as the small elements that are involved in the cooking process, and the act of cooking itself.

“The ordinary man becomes the narrator” according to Michel de Certeau, 40 and while not a literary canon, Anuja and Hetal’s cooking channel is a powerful digital public space, given its global audience. Their domestic space in the host home is a hybrid space that “makes new” traditions and energizes the hybrid identity. YouTube, then, mediates different concepts of home and space that are embedded in each other. Through this digital platform, “ShowMetheCurry” specifically investigates multitudes of cultures,

39 John Hartley (2009) reconsiders phatic communication in the context of YouTube and microblogging, stating how this form of communication should be reevaluated “as an intellectual resource” (138). 40 De Certeau (1984), 5. De Certeau theorizes how “Stories are becoming private and sink into their secluded spaces in neighborhoods, families, or individuals, while rumors propagated by the media cover everything and, gathered under the figure of the City, the masterword of any anonymous law, the substitute for all proper names, they wipe out or combat any superstitions guilty of still resisting the figure” (“Walking in the City” 108).

89 identities and alterities, as they relate to physical spaces. This platform, in many senses of the word, is a true hybrid space, one that not only houses, but also produces hybrid subjects, thus blurring boundaries. The movement of culture through YouTube is also interesting because YouTube is both the medium, but also is the sphere and the public that contains the audience to which it is reaching out. YouTube then both contains and is a collective of different diasporic individuals who also make up a counter-public. The

YouTube heterotopia juxtaposes the past and present and blurs boundaries between geopolitical divides. The cooking videos in this case also meld together the fictionalized accounts of places through memory, and the reality of the political present of the home of the past. Motivated by culinary nostalgia, “ShowMetheCurry” then creates a heterotopic space online where audiences from all over the world can interact with Anuja and Hetal, transcending the dichotomies of public and private, real and “exotic” images of the subcontinent, as well as combining geospatial and temporal dichotomies.

Chapter Four: Culinary Work and the Diasporic Domesticity

As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define it, “Affective Labor”41 is something that deals with the work of nurturing and servitude that has historically been thought of as women’s work.42 Typically in subcontinental societies, there is no monetary reward or security for a woman who spends her life raising a family and taking care of her home.

Identity crises also arise when a woman’s work in raising her children comes to a halt when they become adults and become independent. In terms of the subcontinental diasporic context, the work of a woman and the role she has in the re-homing process are crucial because in most subcontinental societies, the domestic work that includes cooking, cleaning, and raising a family is still thought to be “women’s” work. But again, this type of work is more complicated in terms of what it really means for the sacrifice she makes, and the problems of adjustments and adaptation she might encounter. In

Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “Mrs. Sen’s,” the titular character comes to America because of her husband’s work as a professor at a university. She has no reason to belong to America and resists accepting her host home in every way possible. She articulates this resistance by dressing in saris, refusing the need to learn how to drive and also by preparing Indian recipes in her domestic space, using the tools from home.

41 Hardt and Negri (2004) define the term as “labor that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion” (108). 42 Drawing upon the work of feminist scholars, Hardt and Negri specifically explain how women’s work fits into the broader category of affective labor: “Certainly domestic labor does require such repetitive material tasks as cleaning and cooking, but it also involves producing affects, relationships, and forms of communication and cooperation among children, in the family, and in the community. Affective labor is biopolitical production in that it directly produces social relationships and forms of life” (110).

In reality, this is the situation for many diasporic women, who constantly long for home and feel a sense of identity confusion when they realize that the only reason they are in a different home is to support their spouses. The women in this case then have to find ways of articulating their own identities and subjectivities. Anuja and Hetal enact this articulation through their YouTube channel. I read the performance of these recipes as corporeal biographies, documenting the important work of their daily lives and creating an archive of their stories on YouTube.

Although we are not sure of why Anuja and Hetal are in Texas, and whether their sole reason for being in the US is to support their spouses, we do know that the work they do in the home is something they have used to define themselves, at least to the YouTube public. In an interview, Anuja and Hetal explain the reason for their YouTube venture, stating, “We were at similar stages in our lives, having had children and not wanting to go back to working full-time. We needed a business where we could be there for the kids once they got home from school and the flexibility to call our own shots” (“Cooking Up a

South Asian Success Story”).

Starting this venture on YouTube, then, was a way for the two women to “work,” to have a business without sacrificing time with their families. The work they do on

YouTube is one which also offers them monetary agency because of their presence on

Facebook and their website that have helped to brand “ShowMeTheCurry.” The channel demonstrates that domestic work can be a site of exchange where money and fame can be earned. When the work of the private domestic sphere is taken to the public, it has monetary value. This also speaks to the fact that there is a demand for domestic labor and the public is willing to pay money for services and products related to the domestic home,

92 such as cookbooks, cooking utensils and catering services. This is not a new concept, since many popular TV celebrity chefs are not formally trained. Nigella Lawson and

Rachel Ray, to name a few, have made their names in the culinary world through their charismatic presentation styles and demonstrations of a quick and simple philosophy to food preparation that has resonated with audiences all over the world. Padma Lakshmi, another celebrity chef, for example, has also gained currency in the culinary world, thanks to her “easy exotic” selling point.43 The TV chefs, because of their more pronounced presence in the popular imagination than YouTube chefs, have a lot more authority and agency when it comes to influencing cultures and food trends. Padma

Lakshmi, for example, because of her Indian heritage and fame as a model and TV presenter, has become an authority of sorts in the West when it comes to “Indian” food.

But the “Indian” she sells is a fusion variety, something that appeals to the West and to the subcontinental diaspora in the West. This variety, however, is not geared towards the audiences in the Indian subcontinent to sell the tradition, but a trendy version of “exotic”

Indian food and culture.

Cooking shows on television also present the act as a gendered activity, with cooking being characterized differently when male and female chefs perform the act.

Until recently, cooking for the public with different levels of training and for an audience broader than the scope of the family, has been the domain of men, while the interior, unrecognized everyday cooking for the family kind of work has been the domain of women and “housewives,” whose work seems to go unnoticed. Cooking shows in this

43 Padma Lakshmi has authored a book entitled Easy Exotic: A Model’s Low Fat Recipes from Around the World (1999).

93 way have bridged the distance between the two different types of work, by bringing to focus the work of amateur home cooks such as Nigella Lawson. Cooking competitions such as MasterChef also have brought about a change in the sense that the gender distinctions dissipate somewhat, in that contestants consist of both women and men. Men who have jobs outside the home also compete to prove their cooking skills. Cooking shows then in this case have also managed to redefine the image of Western masculinity and the act has also become a language in itself, articulating and affording women their agency and recognition. Although housework is still considered “women’s work,” and there is no monetary compensation for this work, presenters on YouTube such as Anuja and Hetal have been able to use the digital platform as a mechanism for marketing their skills. This has given them earning power, and popularity which fuels their celebrity and making of the “ShowMetheCurry” brand.

Traditionally in patriarchal cultures, domestic work has relegated women to the interior space of the domestic sphere, a certain kind of acceptable exclusion from society.

This is not true for the YouTube sphere which, by projecting this domestic skill to the online public, has destroyed these old boundaries. On YouTube, the time spent cooking meals is time spent wisely, as Anuja and Hetal (and other cooks and chefs on either the

TV or YouTube) have still been able to inhabit the role of teacher, and do their work in front of a global audience. This kind of kitchen pedagogy on YouTube mimics a matrilineal exchange that exists in a domestic kitchen when the mother teaches her daughter to cook. Anuja and Hetal, by “teaching” these recipes to viewers, also perform affective labor by imparting knowledge and creating an online community. The triviality that is often associated with kitchen work also disappears in these contexts, since this

94 work becomes the subject of communication and engagement in discussion, thus leading to a formation of communities, as I have mentioned in Chapter Three. The YouTube sphere frees these amateur chefs from their domestic interiority and brings their work to a broader public domain. This not only breaks them away from the confines of their homes, but also elevates the task of cooking as important cultural work.

Aside from the YouTube sphere, cooking has ironically also been a way of marketing and a subject of business for corporations. Anuja and Hetal also use this activity as a means of branding themselves. Similarly, franchises such as Kraft Foods,

Betty Crocker, and Martha Stewart, to name a few, have marketed their own brands by producing cookbooks and instructional websites, and videos on YouTube and on television that have helped to exploit the various cultural aspects of cooking. These videos are premised upon the idea that the products are to make life easier. However, by making recipes “simple,” what they are also doing is providing a prescriptive and influential culinary context that also operates in shaping culture and tastes. Betty Crocker for example is undoubtedly an influential brand, which also promises to deliver easy meals to its consumers. But the danger is in the way these cookbooks and brands talk about culture and anything that is not a part of Western cuisine. On the Betty Crocker

“recipes” section for example, the recipes are divided under the subcategory of “Global” and then under “Indian.” Again, this representation assumes a culinary and culturally homogenous landscape of the subcontinent, because different regions of India,

Bangladesh and Pakistan have distinct methods of cooking, and delicacies that are unique to particular subcontinental spaces. Also problematic is the website’s description, which summarizes what “Indian” cuisine is:

Alluring spice combinations play starring roles in Indian cooking—imagine the

aromatic ingredients that blend to make curry or classic chai tea. Whether hot or

simply flavorful, they lend Indian dishes a distinct, standout flavor. Sample exotic

India here, from simple lentil-and-rice dishes with roti bread to grilled lamb

skewers or scrumptious Tandoori-style chicken. (“Betty Crocker ‘Indian’”)

The problem with this description is that the “India” represented is one which is a strongly associated with Indian cuisine in the Western imagination, with descriptions of food that are familiar in the West. For example Tandoori chicken and chai tea can be found in Indian restaurants in North America and in frozen/ dehydrated convenience packed forms in grocery stores. Betty Crocker is then again marketing their brand with what is familiar to the Western public, and is also failing to introduce other forms of subcontinental cuisine. The brand is perpetuating a myth about how India is an abstract place on the map, and that access to this place can be granted through “curry” and masala. The brand performs both an exoticization of the subcontinent, and at the same time, it also recycles the same image of India that exists in the Western imagination.

Betty Crocker and other Western food companies in this way are failing to actually introduce to the West the diversity of subcontinental cuisines and cultures. On the brand’s website, it sells its own products by adding ingredients that make certain dishes “Indian.”

One example of this is the recipe for “Indian Spiced Chex ® Mix,” which entails the addition of spices such as ground cardamom and ginger that are used in subcontinental food. This recipe also includes three types of Chex® cereals, which is produced by

General Mills, the parent company of Betty Crocker.

What they offer in the way of easy authenticity is a diluted Westernized perspective on Eastern “exotic” food culture. Moreover, selling their brand through the message that consumers are going to be able to “consume” a culture and ingest exoticism is also a reductionist act. In North America, especially in spaces and to people who have never travelled outside of their cultural contexts, these messages can be wrongly interpreted. The message becomes one of being able to have easy access to culture, to be able to own, conquer and consume a culture, an ideology akin to that of the ideology of colonization.

Another popular and influential food company in North America, in terms of their global reach, is Kraft Foods, which also claims to sell products that make cooking easier.

This channel is similar to Anuja and Hetal’s promise of providing a simplification of cuisines through their own YouTube channel. In recent years, through programming on television and through their YouTube channel “The Kraft Channel,” the brand has shown cooking as a way of navigating home life. The channel, for example, provides “solutions” to the “problem” of negotiating time to cook meals. On their YouTube channel, their solutions include “Easy Dinner Recipes - 30 Minute Quick Dinner Ideas” (Metro). The video starts by showing a beef and broccoli recipe that uses a Kraft salad dressing as seasoning. Another recipe shown in the same video is for “Stove Top One-Dish Chicken

Skillet.” While the dish is made on the stove as the title suggests, it is also a reference to the fact that the recipe uses Kraft ’s boxed Stove Top stuffing mix. Another recipe entitled

“Italiano Ravioli with Two Sauces” promises an Italian dish. But this ravioli dish uses wonton wrappers as the “pasta,” and the stuffing includes a cheese mixture using Kraft ready to use packaged cheeses. The pasta sauce as well uses Kraft products such as the

Italian dressing as a cooking medium instead of oil, and Kraft’s cream cheese in the recipe. While these recipe don’t promise authenticity, they do inhabit a problematic position in the way their prescribed cooking methods, although offering simplicity and ease, clash with “traditional” ways of cooking, especially when they attempt to offer a taste of different cultures through their recipes.

The tendency to present “multiculturalism” is also there in Anuja and Hetal’s videos, when the two presenters aim to incorporate different cuisines within their mostly subcontinental culinary corpus. In 1996, an article in the Chicago Tribune, after the Betty

Crocker icon underwent another makeover, reported that “She appears to be younger and darker, and features a broad smile, a stylish hairdo, contemporary clothing and accessories, and facial accents that could be interpreted as Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian or

Native American.”44 The problem with this intention is in the fact that this one image is designed to be read as including multiple racial identities.45 This ambivalence of the designs takes away from the cultural integrity in each of these identities. To say that the image can be read as any of these is to say that “Caucasian, Hispanic, Asian or Native

American” are all one in the same, at least to the naked consumer eye. The same article quotes a Betty Crocker spokeswoman, Cindy Guettle who states, “People's impressions of

Betty Crocker will be determined by their environments and backgrounds. She's got a bit

44The article by Joseph Kirby is titled “Betty Crocker Gets Multicultural Makeover: Images Of 75 Women Blended In Update Of Icon.” The article can be accessed at : 45 Laura Sloan Patterson (2008) summarizes the Betty Crocker logo evolution as existing from “a disembodied face on a product label, and in its current twenty-first century incarnation as the name on a spoon-shaped product logo” (197-198).

98 of all the women across America today in her.” This again is problematic because of the fact that the target is again a woman, as is the case with other emblems such as Aunt

Jemima and Mrs. Fields. This also echoes the idea that cooking and domestic work is woman’s work. Another problem is with the fact that this 1996 Betty Crocker seems to embody the “melting pot” ideology of the US. The brands operate to confuse identity and a sense of self in those who migrate to countries in the West, and to form the context that then dictates how some view themselves as “others” In the context of the host culture.

While looking at the emblem of Aunt Jemima, African-American women or other African immigrants may form the idea that she must be the ideal mother, and her place in society is the space in the home kitchen. These objects of myth formation feed into narratives that then inform subjectivities.

Similarly, in its YouTube videos and infomercials on television, Kraft Foods continues to show the pristine “American” kitchens and images that don’t really demonstrate the presence of other cultures. The kitchen never includes utensils from other cultures for example, something that makes them failures in marketing their identity as multinational and culturally inclusive brands. And when Betty Crocker for example does try to be “multicultural,” it does so by packaging its products with the labels and sentiments of “exoticism.” Anuja and Hetal, in their videos, also do not use traditional

“Indian” utensils in their kitchen, at least as presented through their YouTube videos, and

I read this as a way for the two women to advocate “simplicity,” along the same vein as

Kraft and Betty Crocker make the same promise.

For example, on their website for the recipe for “Garam Masala,” the description reads, “In 20 minutes, this flavorful concoction will be ready to add an exotic touch to

99 your meal.” The website also misrepresents subcontinental cuisine by offering recipes using ingredients that are not typically “Indian.” For example, in the section for “India,” the brand includes recipes for “Thai Turkey Burgers with Red Curry Mayo” and

“Vegetable Curry with Couscous.” Couscous is Middle Eastern and although because of globalization and the vast transfer of cultural influences, couscous can be found on the subcontinent, it does not belong in a section that is supposed to be characterizing Indian food. Perhaps what has made the first recipe appear in the “Indian” section, although the title clearly also says “Thai,” is that the brand is making an assumption that “curry,” whether Thai or Indian, is the same. This again points to the problematic way that popular media and advertising can perform a homogenization of cultures.

On YouTube, Anuja and Hetal’s diasporic kitchen shows a different side of culture and “ethnicity.” In a different way than how Kraft and Betty Crocker misrepresent

“curry,” Anuja and Hetal also cause some contention, as viewed through the user comments, about what “authentic” versions of some of the recipes entail. The kitchen they have is a part of one of the presenters’ actual homes, and one that is full of “exotic” spices and ingredients that are not a part of the everyday North American Western diet.

But these ingredients speak to a culinary familiarity with other subcontinental viewers.

These viewers, with their insider knowledge about Indian food, are judgmental about what is considered authentic and sometimes voice their criticism on the comments section of the recipes. In the recipe for “Kottayam (Kerala) Fish Curry Recipe,” an audience member, “roopa8683,” asserts that the chef in Chennai in India has given Anuja “the wrong version.” Other viewers also voice a similar opinion saying that the name should be changed because “Kottayam” fish curries do not have tamarind in them.

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Anuja and Hetal, then, while encountering criticisms about “authenticity,” also treat cuisine and food in different ways. Whereas Kraft and Betty Crocker advocate simplicity, the two presenters also aim to show “variety” in the context of subcontinental cuisine. For example, aside from just lending voices to the corpus of subcontinental cooking, Anuja and Hetal have claimed agency though their YouTube channel in other ways. For them, as well as other amateur cooks and artists, YouTube acts as a way to market their products and skills so that it enhances the marketability of their businesses, thus creating a brand. On their website, Anuja and Hetal recommend pots and pans, spices and cookbooks that then link to the US Amazon site, so that consumers can have ingredients and utensils that they need for recipes they find on the website and on

YouTube. Aside from the fact that their YouTube channel and website have become profitable ventures for Anuja and Hetal, they have also been able to use the site to assert their cultural identity.

While they do talk about the fact that the show encompasses a kind of Indian subtext that is about asserting their culture, epidermal recognition, as I have discussed earlier, also works to make diasporic connections with the public in the digital sphere.

But the work they do in this digital space straddles two boundaries, where Anuja and

Hetal both hover between the roles of commodifiers and advocates and ambassadors of culture. The other goal the two women achieve is that of being compensated for domestic work, something that is denied within most societal paradigms. The domestic work of cooking is elevated in this context, to being something that has a kind of social capital that is attached with the celebrity of “television chefs” and professional cooks. But in

101 bringing the act of cooking to the public sphere, the work becomes something other than domestic. It becomes a sensationalized and glamorized part of everyday life.

By blurring distinctions between everyday trivial matters with the privileged work that gains attention from the public sphere, the work of cooking becomes domestic labor redefined. Aside from just bringing to the attention of the public the work of the domestic sphere, texts such as cookbooks and YouTube cooking videos are stories of travel adventures. The Complete Asian Cookbook, for example, advertises itself on its own cover description as offering “a collection of over 800 authentic recipes from countries across Asia, including India, China, Japan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand. The

Complete Asian Cookbook remains the most authoritative resource on Asian cookery available today, and has been translated in German, French and Dutch.” The 2011 edition of this book comes covered in silk fabric, and from this presentation sells the exoticism and culinary adventures to its mostly Western audience. The message here again is that

“Asian” cultures and their cuisines are exotic to the West and can be easily accessed through this cookbook. The book also promises a quick culinary tour of the Asian continent through 800 recipes. The idea that Solomon and her publishers are trying to convey is the marketing of the recipes as “authentic.” To validate this “authenticity,” the back cover of the book also states that “In putting together The Complete Asian

Cookbook, Charmaine travelled widely through many parts of Asia, revisiting familiar places and discovering new ones to ensure that, as always, her recipe development was completely authentic.” This one -line disclaimer is intended to satisfy any critic who challenges the authenticity of the recipes and the credibility of the book and its author.

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But the fact is that cooking is more than just the dissemination of recipes. The teaching of the act also entails a certain mastering of techniques, movements and gestures that become inscribed in the hands and the body, that take years of everyday practice to achieve. The perfection of making a paratha for example entails years of experience in not only perfecting the texture of the dough, but also the movements and folds that make layers in this circular flatbread. These techniques cannot be taught visually, not even through videos, and definitely not through cookbooks. In India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, this is taught by a family member. The lesson of making this delicacy and history of the family and work of the home is transmitted through the performance of this exchange of knowledge. Anuja and Hetal, in the same way, facilitate a pedagogical exchange between not only themselves and the audience members, but also between audience members, through the platform of their comments section.

Corporeal memory, the memory of the hands and fingers, the feeling of textures, makes cooking an organic experience. This kind of corporeal teaching also inscribes within it generations of histories, with one mother teaching her daughter the techniques she was also taught by her own kin. The traditions of this kind encase biographical accounts and life histories of a matrilineage that become entangled and disseminated through the act of cooking. The preparation of food is then a telling of stories and histories, of a kind of crafting of a biography not through the medium of verbal language, but through the medium of a “gestural linguistics” that reside in the body. These corporeal biographies then speak not only of the past generations, but also of places in the past, and celebrations and circumstances that dictated that the Mutton Biryani, for example, be served. To re-enact recipes then is to attempt a retelling of stories and an

103 attempt at re-conjuring the past in the present, binding generations of people together, and combining in unison and harmony a fluid transnational, extra-temporal connection of homes and nurturing. These elements might be present in videos, in the practice of cooking itself and also in anecdotes that are presented in cookbooks; but in the commercial packaging of cooking videos by Kraft Food and Betty Crocker, these aspects are irrelevant, disregarding the link between personal history and present lived experience that food is often a reflection of.

Even the ingredients and combinations used in a dish call for the reconjuring of the past through not only corporeal gestures, but also through anecdotal accounts. In the same way that Anuja and Hetal’s YouTube videos sometimes incorporate the presenters’ own anecdotes and stories related to the recipes they share, in The Settler’s Cookbook, the author Yasmin Alibhai-Brown documents family recipes and prefaces each recipe with memories that are attached to each recipe. She remembers the women of her childhood in

Uganda, before she migrated to the UK. Her story is also a journey that encompasses the migration of her previous generations, from India to Uganda. When she moves to

England, she brings with her things from her home in Uganda. “Why I transported old pots and pans to England I cannot explain. I try but am unable to throw them away. The motley collection has had several stays of execution. During cleaning fits, I chuck them into a box to be dumped, and they return back to the house, just in time” (3). The pots and pans that keep coming back into her collection of things represent the fact that in these belongings resides a part of her identity and past that she is afraid she will lose. These items are also a manifestation of the compressed and concentrated histories of her

104 bloodline. They are a tribute to the journeys of her parents as well, which is inextricably linked to her own story and journey.

While Anuja and Hetal might use cooking as a form of agency, in that this act now gains a global public through YouTube, Alibhai-Brown’s account of her mother demonstrates how the refusal to teach her daughter how to cook is a form of resistance.

Before she divulges recipes to her readers, Alibhai-Brown also talks about what recipes are important to her. One of the recipes in the book is for the staple boiled rice, which accompanies other dishes in any Indian meal. This anecdote explains how her mother’s attitude towards her own role in the family is also mixed with the hopes that her daughter will have a different reality:

At twenty-three I can only make roti, puri and rice, also English food learned in

domestic-science classes. Mum believed that hands had to be trained early to

make the delicate movements needed to roll perfect rounds of dough. Rice I

observed her cooking until she shooed me off to do my homework: “Plenty time

in life to learn to cook. You girls have bigger future than us ladies, so innocent

and ignorant we are. You must be somebody. Men are no good, have to stand on

own feet. Make your own money, don’t ask a man for anything. Yassi, you do

that, then I will teach you rice and everything.” (37-38)

An exchange takes place here between the mother and daughter, with the former revealing how her life of domestic work has no value in the patriarchal system in Uganda.

Housework, she teaches her daughter, should come secondary to education and agency in the public sphere, and she asserts that her daughter should first be independent before

105 learning how to cook. This conversation reveals how the author’s mother has accepted her life and lack of agency, but that she wants her daughter to fight the established system. The refusal to teach her daughter to cook is then an act of resistance against the systems that binds Alibhai-Brown’s mother to the domestic sphere. This anecdote changes the history of the rice dish, by leaving within the newly interpreted recipe, the mark of the cook of the present and this melancholic memory of the mother-teacher. The writing down of the recipe documents how the pedagogical exchange between women also entails mimicry46 of the past domesticity, in which the daughter for example, performs housekeeping and nurturing the mother did in the past.

Authors in “Practices, Identification and Identity Change in the Transition to

Motherhood” document how Silma, a young Bangladeshi British woman, adapts to her new role of mother. The sociological study aims to show how some of Silma’s changing identity as a mother is a form of mimicry and adaptation from her matrilineage. This performance of the role is because of the fact that some of these characteristics are brought about from dormant memories of herself as a child, and thus also in her identification as a mother, she changes between identifying with her own child as herself as a baby and her own mother and herself as a mother. The authors term this as

“unconscious identification with the maternal generation of the family” (28). Similarly, women, when they become wives, may also subconsciously mimic their own mothers and the way they performed their roles and wives and homemakers. In this sense, they

46 Where Homi Bhabha (1994) uses the term “mimicry” to denote the postcolonial subject’s tendency to reproduce the structures and ways of the colonizers, I use the term almost in reverse, as a way for the diasporic subject to reproduce her own past of the home of origin, in the context of the West.

106 perform the role of homemaker in the same way as the women of their past generations performed them.

In the same article, the authors note an “intersubjective” relationship in the role of mother and child, as Silma identifies with both roles when she recalls experiences of being mothered. This resonates with the fact that Anuja and Hetal also conjure up the women in their families as they cook and share recipes, and also adopt a similar intersubjective position. In “Show Me the Curry's Suji Halwa Dessert Recipe,” Hetal articulates that the recipes on YouTube will be there as an archive for her own daughter as she learns to cook. As she and Anuja narrate and demonstrate the recipe of this semolina dessert, she states, “For me, when I think of my mother and my children, this defines it all.” The Suji Halwa recipe then mediates the intersubjectivity of Hetal as mother and child. Their lives, in this state of in-betweenness, take on this other different dimension. Similarly, the way that Silma mimics her mother’s role is a way for her to hold on to a past that might be a safe temporal space in a present where her role as mother is new to her. Heather Elliott et al. states how this oscillation of roles works:

From a psychoanalytic perspective, when a woman becomes a mother she can

access dormant infantile experiences from when she was a baby, embodied

experience that incorporates her own mother’s handling. Through unconscious

identification with this early mother, she can be attuned to her baby’s needs

without conscious knowledge. (24-25)

Cooking practices contain similar “embodied influences,” as daughters watch their mothers cook and absorb similar methods and culinary traditions.

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Another example of this intersubjective exchange is one YouTube video on the

“Everyday Food” channel, a brand that is also a subsidiary of the Martha Stewart47 brand.

The presenter Sarah Carey, to celebrate Mother’s Day, shows audiences how to prepare

“Susan’s Manicotti,” her mother’s recipe, but one to which she has made slight changes.

She starts the video by showing a recipe book which was produced by the commune she grew up on, and that contains a photograph of herself as a child. She states that every time she makes this recipe “she thinks of her mom.” Carey’s own alteration to the recipe is the fact that she uses fresh garlic cloves instead of the garlic powder her mother uses in the “original” recipe in the cookbook. As the recipe progresses, she states that it was when she was making this particular manicotti dish as a child on the commune, she realized she “was born to cook.” As she fills the manicotti shells, she says she wonders if her own children are also born to cook. In the narrative of the video and in the context of the recipe, Carey inhabits an intersubjective position as a child, and then reflects on her own memories to her present position as a mother. “Mikayla thinks she wants to be a chef so maybe she is.” The intersubjective spectrum in the video then oscillates between

“Susan,” Carey’s mother and then Sarah the child, to Sarah the mother to Mikayla the child and possible future cook.

For many people who leave the home they were born in to live in a new “home,” the past is important as the traditions become romanticized and it becomes crucial to

47 Patterson (2008) notes that the Martha Stewart brands “now sell the kitchen not as a warm and homey space for cooking, but as an all-encompassing way of life” (181). This is evident in the way that the brand includes not only Martha Stewart cookbooks along with her website, but a line of home décor products as well. In her case, cooking helped catapult the person and celebrity of Martha Stewart to a major brand and “corporate conglomeration,” as Patterson states.

108 perform everyday tasks such as cooking the same way it was done in the past home.

Orrin E. Klapp in talking about American society states that people are “out of touch with their past” (21). He states that history and tradition are becoming less relevant to what we do as a people” (21). But Klapp suggests that “in modern society, there is a phenomenon of the older generation (what he claims to be of people in their 40s and 50s) looking to youth to provide cultural guidance in terms of what is current” (27). Klapp states that this is a result of the ambiguity of different cultural elements. And because of this ambiguity, there is a vacuum for nostalgia, a craving for the old and familiar.

Similarly, immigrants also crave the past because of the alienation that occurs in the host home. In echoing Nikos Papastergiadis, he suggests that “losing” the past may not be the same thing as romanticizing it, since the latter alludes to a need to adhere strongly to the stories of the past, and to keep them alive and active in the everyday present of the diasporic individual.

The act of cooking and the publication of the videos are then exercises in the act of narrative and art making. Not only do Anuja and Hetal tell stories as they cook, the recipes themselves are also stories, and what Papastergiadis calls allographical accounts.

He talks about how life writing and autobiographical accounts relate to immigrant experiences. He calls for a renaming of the genre of autobiography to that of

109 allography,48 since the former term calls for a privileging of the “subjective experience of the author” (“Ends of Migration”183). Papastergiadis states that an autobiography entails the “oscillation between history as self-recollection and fiction as self-invention.” But the sense of the modern self changes, as “the symbolic space is not only uncertain but seemingly deformed and translated.” “What happens when the subject who writes a history of the self is also the subject of West’s ethnography of the other?” (183). It is this concept that I am interested in: the way that some subjects on YouTube express themselves through the context that others them. “Autobiography is not just about remembering the place you have left behind but could also be about what emerges from

‘nostalgia’ for the place called the future” (188). Allography49 and autobiography, then, are distinct because of the way Anuja and Hetal, through their articulation through cooking, move between the “othered” objects and the “active” subjects who perform cultural articulation and resistance. However, these same videos also contain a notion of

“othering,” as they perform alterations to the original recipes (as discussed in Chapter

One), and it becomes clear to audiences that these adaptations have to be made because the cultural context is different.

48 Allography embraces this qualification of the historical and aesthetic functions of the autobiographical text and is the torch which illuminates the impact of cultural difference in the construction of identity within dominant discourse. Allography refers to those texts which are written from the borders or the unacknowledged positions within the West. They arise from the problematization of the first-person pronoun ‘I’. While autobiography is born with the simultaneous validation of individualism and the crisis of individuality, allography emerges from the crisis in defining a subject position both experientially and philosophically. 49 Papastergiadis (1998) elaborates on the differences between allography and autobiography: “Autobiography is not just about remembering the place you have left behind but could also be about what emerges from the ‘nostalgia’ for the place called the future” (“Ends of Migration” 188).

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Anuja and Hetal’s YouTube cooking videos entail a negotiation between autobiography and allography, with the cook or presenter speaking from an “in-between space,” as I have previously discussed, documenting cultural and family history in recipes. This is in contrast to Solomon’s claim about authenticity in The Complete Asian

Cookbook. Although the book does somewhat document her travels and does tell readers about the sensory aspects of these travels, the cookbook is not really an accurate allographical or autobiographical account of her life. The text, while containing anecdotes about Solomon’s experiences in different parts of Asia, only presents a fragmented version not only of her own life, but also life in the places she visits.

By advertising the author’s extensive travels, in my opinion, the recipes then take away from this idea of the mastering of techniques, and instead, offer a shallow look into different cuisines that are clearly marketed to Western audiences. What cookbooks like this fail to do is to place emphasis on the embodied knowledge and the corporeal memory that are a part of the act of cooking. These aspects of cooking cannot really be taught through books; however, they can be demonstrated much more easily through videos.

But the problem again is the fact that in Solomon’s own recipe collection, she offers recipes from regions that are popular in the Western imagination. For example, in the section entitled “India and Pakistan,” she attempts to cover the cuisine of the Indian subcontinent, but deliberately leaves out the cuisine of Bangladesh. Instead she mentions the fact that the cuisines of Pakistan and India are “so similar that I, for one, would hesitate to say which dishes belong to one country and which to the other” (18). This statement is questionable because the two cuisines might have similar ingredients and methods of cooking, but certain Indian spaces are also drastically different, given that the

111 subcontinent is vastly diverse, with distinct religions and cultures. Religious differences for example dictate dietary restrictions: for example, the consumption of Halal meat in

Muslim spaces, and the restriction on meat in general in other spaces. And about

Bangladesh, she provides an inadequate description of the country and its culinary traditions, by providing brief accounts about its geographical proximity to India and stating that “it shares a more pungent spicing, a tendency to cook in mustard oil rather than ghee, and places an emphasis on a variety of seafood instead of lamb” (18). This simplified description is also problematic, given that if readers were to first learn about the region and its specific countries from this cookbook, they would be getting very little information about the country. Solomon performs a homogenized version of the Indian culinary landscape and orientalizes “Asian” cuisine. So while Solomon “performs” a

“tasting” and “tourism” of cultures, Anuja and Hetal perform cultural identities in the

YouTube heterotopia. Brands like Kraft Foods and Betty Crocker entail a “faking” of the traditions. While “authenticity” is contentious, these brands sell exoticism, and produce a synthetic cultural representation, where they claim to be “multicultural” and “Indian” using their short-cut ready-made ingredients. In contrast, performances, both through the text of Solomon’s cookbook and through Anuja and Hetal’s videos on YouTube, entail a mediation of different selves.

Kathrin Peters and Andrea Seier indicate that because of the new way of mediating the self through YouTube, there exists “an increasing compulsion to self- represent and-stage [that] often entails an under-defined concept of superficial masquerade, simulation and deceit, raising the question of the authentic subjectivity that provides the foil for comparison” (189). In discussing the teenage bedroom on YouTube

112 as Foucauldian heterotopias, they claim that there is a merging of the “private and public, actually existing and utopian, performative and transgressive spaces” (“Home Dance”

199). Through “ShowMeTheCurry,” Anuja and Hetal perform recipes. Thus in turn, they inevitably adopt a personality that is a part of their own lives but that is also separate from their real home identities. The characters they play on their channel are versions of themselves, but versions that amplify their Indian identities. The YouTube space then is a heterotopic space that allows not only the blurring of the public and private spheres, but also the boundaries between the past and present, performative and true selves, and of course, the distinctions between global and local cultures. Anuja and Hetal literally present a fragmented aspect of their identities on the YouTube sphere. While the space portrayed in the videos is one of the presenters’ own kitchens, the audience sees them only in that space and only in that moment, inhabiting the role they play as cooks. This is a moment where performance and reality collapse into each other. But the audience does not see Anuja and Hetal in their other roles as mothers or wives, or in doing their other work outside of that interior kitchen space.

There is an interesting parallel here to the perforated sheet metaphor from

Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, where the protagonist’s grandfather, a doctor, is allowed to only examine his female patient Naseem, in parts and fragments through a perforated sheet (4). In the novel, this is a metaphor for a fragmented identity created as a result of the post-Independence India. Similarly on YouTube, the audience is only offered glimpses of the presenters in parts and fragments, and the performative selves are there to remind users that we are seeing the presenters in the present, in fragments that live in liminality. Each video makes up parts of a greater whole of Anuja and Hetal’s lives that

113 the audience will never get to see. While this is mostly due to the time limitation of the

YouTube videos, and also the fact that the two presenters aim to only keep their channel focused on cooking clips, it is also a conscious choice. There are other YouTube channels that show cooking but the videos, in some respects, aren’t as organized and composed as those on “ShowMeTheCurry.” Hannah Hart, for example, on her channel “My Drunk

Kitchen,” shows recipes as she progressively becomes inebriated throughout the length of the video. Cooking, on her channel, is about comedy rather than actual demonstrations of recipes. Her videos are not aimed at showing perfection in cooking, but rather, are meant to celebrate chaos. The videos on “ShowMetheCurry” are all designed to emulate the cooking shows on television. On other YouTube channels, however, the presenters are not too mindful of the fact that other images of their everyday lives may seep into the videos. Whether it’s the sometimes careless slippage of a crying child in the background, or a pet walking across the table in the middle of the screen shot, none of these make it into Anuja and Hetal’s clips. They are “clean” in this sense, without all the background chaos that one might expect in amateur videos.

So the fact that these cooking videos document everyday experiences is both true and false. The accounts of everyday lives are sanitized versions that deal with anecdotal, short clips of the lives and work of Anuja and Hetal, but they also have to deal with the fact that these videos are crafted to look performed and perfected. The channel is positioned somewhere between the professionally produced cooking shows on mainstream TV and other amateur videos on YouTube that celebrate disorganization and chaos.

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The videos of Anuja and Hetal are also an archive of journeys and adaptation. As viewers, we must be mindful of the fact that these videos are also performances, and only display certain carefully cultivated aspects of daily lives. We must also be skeptical of the fact that these recipe stories, although allographical, also entail performances that may or may not take away from the “authenticity” of the presenters’ own experiences. In their videos, Anuja and Hetal manage to present corporeal biographies and create an archive of recipe stories that are meant to connect generations of their families, and of course, other diasporic individuals on the Internet. Even though, as I have argued above, there are problematic representations of cultures and identities in these videos, food is both writing and language that makes permanent the stories of “home.”

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Chapter Five: The Racializion of Cuisine: Finding a Place for the ‘Ethnic’

As an answer to the dominant and often “othering” American culture, I read the publishing of the videos by Anuja and Hetal, through their channel, as a way to “write back.” The fact that they do decide to publish “how-to” videos of Indian recipes is a testament to the fact that the two women perform resistance to the dominant culture.

Cooking in a way here then becomes an act of agency, since Anuja and Hetal retain their culinary heritage of subcontinental food in their homes in Texas. Aside from trying to

“dilute” the sensory stimulations and the connection to the past in the meals, Anuja and

Hetal also use certain methods to adapt their cuisine to the circumstances of the host home. But what is also interesting is the way they alter ingredients themselves. Often, chefs on YouTube who are situated in the West attempt to show different recipes from around the world and are aware of the fact that they will face criticism about what they term as “authentic.” While this term itself is contentious, according to Allen S. Weiss, this factor comes into play when a food is removed from its culinary context, both spatially and temporally.50 So while other chefs on YouTube, as I will explain later, are careful not to term their food as “authentic,” Anuja and Hetal are criticized by their viewers for not showing “authentic” recipes, as they set up expectations about authenticity through the way they name some of their recipes.

50 Weiss (2011) notes that “authenticity” has traditionally been inscribed a “rigid” definition: “Spatially, authenticity is generally synonymous with indigenous, tantamount to a geographic and cultural delimitation; temporally, it is roughly synonymous with traditional and is, thus, permeated by history, which determines how a recipe changes over time” (76).

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In other channels, “Chef John” and “Hilah” deal with this issue by showing the recipes and in their commentary, actively say that their attempt is not authenticity at all, but their own interpretation. Anuja and Hetal bring attention to domestic work that is taken for granted, by lending their own interpretations of subcontinental cooking. The recipes they share are also their own personal stories of how they accept and combine the two cultures that are to be a part of their new home. In this chapter I argue that food operates as a text, in the way it is open for interpretation. As I will explain below, food is also racialized, in terms of how it is allocated space in grocery stores and in specific spaces in communities. As I demonstrate in this chapter, food can act as a catalyst of self- consciousness, where Anuja and Hetal, for example, “recirculate” the “exotic,” and “edit” elements of their culinary traditions to “fit” into the context of the West. Both similarly and inversely, cooks on other channels are also self-conscious about what they term as

“authentic.” I again allude to my examples in the previous chapter, of food companies in the West such as Kraft Food and Betty Crocker that represent non-Western cultures and cooking as “domestic” work. While in the previous chapter, I have used these examples to show how the two brands demonstrate ahistorical accounts of food and recipes, in this chapter, I use examples of the same recipes to demonstrate how the “multicultural” food they show on their websites are miscategorized.

Anuja and Hetal’s videos assert the fact that they refuse to fully conform, and instead in their homes, retain their pasts, however fragmented, through their recipes. Food in this case is a major part of their now hybrid identity. They not only introduce their cuisine to interested Western viewers, but also teach back something to the original homeland. So for example, when Anuja and Hetal cook “quinoa pulao,” this Western

117 interpretation, viewers in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh also make this a part of their collection of recipes of subcontinental food. In this way, I argue that “authenticity” remains a fluid quality when it comes to food. Anuja and Hetal adapt their recipes to compensate for facilities and ingredients they do not have in the West and they reinterpret traditional cuisines and add this hybrid cuisine back to the greater culinary context of subcontinental cooking through viewers in the subcontinent. In this process, involving the adaptation of the “Eastern” techniques to Western ingredients in recipes such as “quinoa pulao,” the two presenters add to a growing corpus of cuisine in the category of Indian cookery. So again, Anuja and Hetal bring with them the knowledge of the original, as passed down through generations. In this way, their recipe stories invoke the specters of generations of women that have made homes in similar ways. They take these originals and reinterpret them, to simplify and to make the “traditional” easier in a new context, and then they broadcast these to a general global audience.

Stigma

One aspect of cuisine in the diasporic space is the food itself, because curry and

Indian food carry with them different levels of stigma and connotations. “Curry,” in the

West for example, is considered to trigger an over stimulation of senses, in its colors and tastes, and it is one that threatens whiteness of the culture in the host home. Anita Mannur references an episode of the show Sex and the City, where Carrie Bradshaw, the protagonist, goes to rent an apartment and is disappointed that the smell of curry infiltrates the space, frustrating, because of the high rent of the apartment. The offensive smell is considered to be such because it is alien and uninviting, something that infiltrates the otherwise “unethnic” upper middle-class New York environment that the character

118 wishes to make for herself. This alludes to the way the “ethnic” and artifacts of non-

Western cultures occupy separate spaces in the Western context. The way the invasion of the Indian influences seem to be a threat to the Western space is also interesting. The message in this episode is that the Indian artifact of food and its traces deserve a separate context and space. The message to the subcontinental diasporic audience is that the non-

Western body does not belong in the Western space.

“Ethnic food” is given separate categories in grocery store aisles in the West. This separateness that is ascribed to this category of cuisine relegates it to the margins of the heterogeneous mainstream culture. The smell and colors of curry also relegate it to a separate sphere, where the look and smell are over stimulating, and because curry’s origin is non-Western, it is included in a different category, to maintain its segregation from the Western mainstream. For example, Thai spices, Indian spice mixes and seasonings all belong to “ethnic” aisles or in separate “ethnic” food stores. In YouTube, this cultural separateness is destroyed, because a segregation of this nature does not really exist on a digital platform, since the YouTube audience can choose to view anything they want. The cuisine of different cultures is all contained on one digital platform, and as I will discuss later in this chapter, also helps to connect different communities.

The idea that surrounds Indian food in Western contexts is the fact that food from this region is usually considered to be overly spicy, with smells that are not really appreciated by everyone. Indian food in the West, especially that which is served in restaurants, is usually different in some way than their counterparts in India, with flavors being adjusted so that spiciness of the cuisine is easier on the palates of those who are not accustomed to the flavors and heat used in Indian cooking. In the essay “Bitter After

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Taste,” focusing on cultural perceptions surrounding food and culinary aesthetics, Ben

Highmore cites as an example an interview with a subcontinental restaurateur Javed, who owned a restaurant in the UK, and was one day serving a customer who complained that the vindaloo he ordered was not spicy enough. The instance was one that insulted Javed’s ethos, so he then proceeded to put chilies in the curry. Highmore reflects:

Javed’s account is thick with affect; it is laced with intimations of violence and

peppered with touches of humor; flavors and feelings are knotted together in

complex and contradictory ways; pleasure and pain, politeness and cunning

animate the production and consumption of sensual culture. The account is an

example of social aesthetics at its most entangled. (133)

Highmore also reads into this scene a multitude of affects and observes that “racist inflection is played out across gender and class” (134). He reads this scenario as a power struggle, because the restaurant owner Javed takes his own “revenge” at defying and puncturing a kind of hierarchal structure that exists in the “Indian” kitchen in the West.

The restaurant workers are all exploited workers who come from India, Pakistan and

Bangladesh, and the restaurant owner is the one who holds the privilege and tries to subvert the customer’s abuse of power. Highmore also reads the restaurant itself as a masculine space, since most of the South Asian restaurants in the UK, according to him, are “run by men” (134). There is then, power and exchange in food and the way it is prepared and served. The chilies are the weapon and the peppering of chilies in the dish, an articulation of violence. Highmore concludes that Gregory Bateson notes that “ethos was achieved through pedagogy the training of the senses of affect, of the orchestration

120 of aesthetic life” (134). But this also means that a change of ethos requires sensual, affective pedagogy.

Similarly, although Anuja and Hetal’s YouTube channel operates as a site of cultural resistance, their videos also demonstrate how they sometimes conform to the racial and cultural stigmas that surround South Asian food. By showing “tips” on how to get rid of curry smells, the presenters not only subscribe to these stigmas, but also speak to how they are conscious of the idea of the infiltrating and assaulting nature of the cuisine. The video “Tip-Stainfree Plastics” demonstrates a tip from an audience member, one who shows that leaving plastic containers out under a strong sun can get rid of yellow curry “stains.” In “Remove Kitchen Odors,” Anuja and Hetal talk about removing “strong pungent odors” to replace them with “strong citrus smells.” This speaks to the fact that the two presenters view their own cooking as releasing unwanted odors and residues, thus emitting an abject quality that does not fit into their setting. The message they convey is that Indian cuisine has strong smells that need to be “replaced” by something more gentle and forgiving like the smell of oranges, or as in another tip in the same video, by the stronger scent of cloves. The two presenters then play into the expectations of sensory norms of the West, where the smell of Indian cooking cannot linger, and must be hidden and dissipated. This sensory unacceptability is present in their Texan setting, and is something that is foreign and intolerable, but in the home of origin, these smells are just a regular part of the environment. The “stains” and “odors” then, to the presenters, represent the “abjectification” of their own identity, something that leads them to think of their own cultural identity as “not belonging” and needing to be “covered up,”

“absorbed” and diluted in some way.

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Conversely to what Chatterjee suggests, that if it is the job of the woman of the household to “preserve” the original identity and culture in the new home, then Anuja and Hetal are subverting this role, bending their role of the preserver to sanitizers, tidying up and cleansing aspects of Indian culture, to fit into the Indian-American diasporic setting. The message here is that if the role of the woman in the Indian household is to hold on to Indian values and traditions, one can do so, but in a fashion that keeps it from being offensive in the context of the host home. The values and traditions in this hybrid location undergo a process of editing, and what is produced is a way of Indian living that has to shave its jagged unevenness to fit into the context of North America. In professing these tips, Anuja and Hetal are apologetic about the “offensive aspects” of their culture.

The food that will be cooked is going to be Indian, but their residues must be taken care of, and the odors hidden with the smell of vinegar, oranges, and covered up with the smell of cloves, and apples and cinnamon.

I read this absorption as an interesting metaphor for their existence in the context of diasporic subjectivity in the West. Absorbing does not work both ways. The individuals in the host nation are to absorb its cultural influences but the host country itself is not to reciprocate, and any other side effects and extra residues are to be diluted.

The diasporic subjects are to absorb the cultures of the West, and its influences are to merge with the genealogical exchanges of past knowledge, that is to then mingle and sanitize itself, giving birth to a hybrid mutation of an Indian-American identity.

Martin Manalansan states in his essay about the New York City foodscape how certain boroughs like Queens are considered to have “aromas,” because of their high concentration of Asian immigrants (96). Citing Alain Corbin as an example, Manalansan

122 explains that these stigmas about certain spaces and the aromas emanating from these spaces are a testament to the fact that the speech about these racialized spaces is laced with the idea of marginalization, of the working class immigrants who inhabit these neighborhoods (96). The stigmas that surround curry and the ghettoization of certain neighborhoods in the subcontinental spaces of New York speak to the fact that food, culture and ethnicities are still regarded in these racialized terms. For example, the

YouTube audience in this way can venture into his or her own culinary intertextual network by looking at recipes for different varieties of “curry.” “Curry” can include not only the subcontinental varieties, but also Thai curry, most commonly known in the West because of Thai restaurants and also by the premade red, green and yellow curry pastes available in Western grocery stores. My point is that through food and specific ingredients, there are different communities and connections that are made, that speak to the YouTube presenters’ and audiences’ identities in some way.

There is an aspect of homogeneity that makes its way into how the West views non-Western cultures. Identity politics makes its way into food is through the umbrella term of the word “Asian.” The term is problematic in two ways. For one thing, “Asian” homogenizes cuisines such as Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. At the same time, this

Western distinction excludes the cuisine of the subcontinent, as “Asian” excludes

“Indian” which is given its own category. One example of this is how Western grocery stores are organized; another example of this miscategorization is in how, as I have mentioned previously, Betty Crocker organizes its online recipes. One can also conclude that the term “Indian” is problematic in the same way. In the West, “Indian” restaurants are also inclusive of Bangladeshi and Pakistani cuisines. The term “Indian” also nullifies

123 these distinctions. The YouTube sphere is spatially and culturally stratified in this sense, because the user can easily obtain access to any cuisine she wants based on a quick internet search. But as Manalansan notes in contrast, in New York, especially in Jackson

Heights the enclave known as the “IndoPakBangla”51 establishment is a problematic term since even in this catch-all phrase which unites and homogenize the cuisines of these three subcontinental regions, there are distinctions among these groups and their cuisines.

Highmore refers to Gregory Bateson in naming “schismogenesis,”52 a term that denotes “forms of acculturation (the cultural process arising from the meeting of distinct cultural groups or cultural factions) that, often aggressively, result in the intensification of cultural differences or cultural rivalry” (127). Schismogenesis then talks about how different cultural groups assert their differences when brought together, rather than blending into one similar group. This works in multiple ways in the YouTube universe.

For one thing, subcontinental diasporic individuals situated in multiple locations in the

West can decide to showcase the same recipe. There are multiple recipes for one dish, such as for a mutton rezala, in the way a presenter from Pakistan and a viewer from

Bangladesh will make them, and in essence, each of these interpretations compete for validity by the audience. There is no one “correct” recipe, and often, cooks have to “make

51 IndoPakBangla refers to diasporic spaces in cities with a concentrated population of people from the subcontinent, namely Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. 52 In “Bitter After Taste,” Ben Highmore (2010), in further exploring the workings of schismogenesis, explains how cultural differences view the standards and concepts of cleanliness, dirt, purity and impurity, all the way to “the ontology of bodies” (129). He explains, in terms of the concepts of “ethos” and “eidos,” where ethos refers to “social aesthetics “and “eidos” refers to the part of the self that is the “rational self” that perhaps challenges the ethos.

124 do” with what ingredients and methods are convenient and available to them, if certain crucial ingredients are unavailable.

Schismogenesis also refers to how meat dishes are interpreted differently by different members of the subcontinent. For example, the Pakistani Muslim individual may eat beef and reject pork, while the Indian Hindu might reject beef and eat pork. On

YouTube, Anuja and Hetal for example, attempt to cater to these differences by mostly showing recipes that are vegetarian. They cater to this racialized, homogenizing perspective that is held by many who want to escape these religious and racial stereotypes. But in attempting to do this, Anuja and Hetal are also falling into the trap of performing a safeguarded, distanced and diluted Indian identity, one that eventually succumbs to the racial views and stereotypes held many.

Aside from trying to “dilute” the sensory stimulations and the connection to the past in the meals, Anuja and Hetal also use certain methods to adapt their cuisine to the needs of the host home. As discussed earlier, the two women use non-stick pans, canned goods and food processors to compensate for the lack of (human) resources that would be available to them in the Indian kitchen. But what is also interesting is the way they alter ingredients themselves. For example, they adapt the Indian rice dish “pulao” by substituting quinoa for rice, not only to make it healthier, but also to cater to the trend that names quinoa as a super food. Quinoa in this case also reflects the idea that different cuisines can influence Indian food. There are however some chefs, both in the mainstream media, and on YouTube, who are aware of the problem of calling something

“authentic.” Often chefs on YouTube, who attempt to show different recipes from around the world are aware of the fact that they will face criticism about what they term as

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“authentic.” They deal with this by showing the recipes and in their commentary, actively say that their cooking is their own interpretation. For example, “Foodwishes,” a channel which features comedic commentary and recipes from “Chef John,” offers its audience a recipe titled “Green Coconut Chicken Recipe.” At the beginning of the video, he states that he refrains from calling it “curry, because it’s not truly authentic, and I don’t want to get in trouble with the curry police. And there have been known instances of curry police brutality.” This disclaimer alludes to the fact he is aware that the audience he speaks to is judgmental about what “curry” is. The audience is especially critical of an American chef who attempts to cook curry. He consciously attempts to avoid the debates concerning the definition of “curry,” because of the cultural “ownership” Thai and Indian cultures have over the word. Instead, he makes his own “paste,” with coconut milk, cilantro, fish sauce and red curry powder, ingredients that go into typical “Thai” cuisine. He justifies the title once again on his blog post, by stating, “The problem with calling something a curry is that people expect it to taste like a curry, and that could mean a whole bunch of things, not all of them good. So, I decided to call it something that wouldn’t necessarily recall a strong taste memory.”

The “memory” that “Chef John” alludes to here is the cultural idea of what

“curry,” in the Thai sense, would mean. Similarly, Madhur Jaffery in her cookbook also

126 criticizes the term “curry”53 as used in the West. “To me the word ‘curry’ is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ‘chop suey’ was to China’s” (5). She goes on to state the following:

53 Uma Narayan (1997) in “Eating Cultures” explores how curry powder itself is a Western invention, one that does not really exist as an ingredient anywhere in the subcontinent. “Curry ” in the Indian context is a mixture of several spices, and curry powder in the West is a compacted and bottled ingredient aimed to deliver the authentic and exotic tastes and flavors of India. The Western invention of the curry powder also nullifies and unifies the subtle subcontinental regional differences in cooking. Through the metaphor of the curry powder, the West then reads India as a single cultural sphere, without the subtle differences in proportions or spices and other ingredients. Curry powder then achieves a simplification and reduction of the subcontinent. Narayan, along with Zlotnick, reads this homogenization as the “incorporation of the Other into the self, but on the self’s terms” (165). The way that curry powder has been adapted to the West is representative of the way India was ingested into the Empire. Narayan again emphasizes this metaphor: They were incorporating not Indian food, but their own invention “of curry powder, a pattern not too different from the way in which India itself was ingested into the Empire—for India as a modern political entity was “fabricated” through the invention of British rule, which replaced the masala of the Moghul empire and various kingdoms and princely states with the unitary signifier “India,” much as British curry powder replaced local masalas.” (165)Narayan also states that this desire for the “other” is further complicated by the fact that the Imperial imagination saw and rejected another India, “that vividly signifies the need for the civilizing mission of British rule” (165). This imperial imagination of India is also a prelude to the way that there is a difference and dichotomy between how home and place are imagined and mediated through the YouTube and other mass media platforms. Where the Empire re-imagined India during the colonial rule, in today’s context, it is mass media, with its duplicitous versions of a single place that is recycled. Citing Nupur Chaudhuri, Narayan also states that while the British in Britain thought of India as the exotic and ate curry and decorated their homes with Indian artifacts, the British in India “rejected Indian objects in their colonial homes and refused Indian dishes in their diet” (Chaudhuri in Narayan 165). Narayan also cites Zlotnic’s examination of the marketing of curry powder to the British. The Victorian examples she discusses reveal Indians testifying to the “authenticity and superiority” of the spices. In this case, in Narayan’s own words, Indian subjects during colonial rule were themselves playing the emissary role, but in trying to define their own culture in British terms.

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“Curry” is just vague inaccurate word which the world has picked up from the

British, who, in turn, got it mistakenly from us. It seems to mean different things

to different people. Sometimes it is used synonymously with all Indian food. In

America it can mean either Indian food or curry powder. To add to this confusion,

Indians writing or speaking in English use the word themselves to distinguish

dishes with a sauce, i.e., stewlike dishes. Of course when Indians speak in their

own languages, they never use the word at all, instead identifying each dish by its

own name. (5)

By demystifying this misused term, Jaffery again performs the pedagogical postcolonial act of clearing the misconceptions that surround her culture and identity. But again, going back to how other cooks and chefs are aware of this very sensitive cultural naming, in another channel, “CookingWithHilah,” an amateur cook with a cookbook that she promotes both on her blog and her YouTube channel, demonstrates how to make

“Homemade Corn Tortillas.” She makes the dough from scratch, and uses a small iron tortilla press and then toasts it on a skillet to produce the flatbread. At the end of her video recipe, she addresses her viewers by asking for questions and comments by stating,

“If you have any questions about the recipe, or any comments about how I screwed it all up and I should just stick to being a white person, please leave them below and I’ll respond as cheerfully as possible.” This comment too shows how the presenter, Hilah, is also aware and resentful of the criticism she faces for cooking meals from other cultures, and how the criticism is always a sensitive issue, as far as “authenticity” is concerned. In both these cases, “Hilah” and “Chef John” display a subtle hint of guilt that arises from their identities which provide them “white privilege” in the United States. The

128 consciousness of the privilege of the dominant population works ironically, and some viewers on their channel, through their criticisms, deny the chefs access to other cultures.

In any case, food from various cultures, and in multicultural domestic settings in the West, always entails “cultural negotiations.” In the essay “Other Women Cooked for

My Husband,” Psyche Williams-Forson explains her own experience of marrying a

Ghanaian man. After their union, “culinary negotiations” had to be made (143). She states that while she was open to experiencing new food, she failed to take into account the fact that cooking also involved the time investment of grocery shopping, and finding specialty ingredients in an American setting. She terms this as “the invisible work of feeding my family” (143). While the invisible work is also affective labor according to

Hardt, Anuja and Hetal are making the invisible visible through YouTube, by talking about individual components that make the recipes. This is especially apparent in their videos that show how to cut onions (“Tip - Onion Tips”), and in the video “How to Ripen

Fruit - Household Tips,” which focus on tasks that are integral to cooking. In “Dry

Chutney Powder Recipe (Molaga Podi),” Anuja and Hetal demonstrate how to make this spice mix, for viewers who do not want to buy store-bought packaged spices.

In the same article, Williams-Forson notes how even when she cooked Ghanaian food, her husband, with his expectation of duplicating the tastes of his motherland, never seemed to be fully satisfied. He then had to rely on a collective of other Ghanaian women who would cook the dishes to the point of “authenticity” he desired. This whole exchange speaks to the disconnection between the expectation of the original cuisine, and the reality of what the ingredients from the host home produce. The passage also demonstrates how the “authentic” in what Anuja and Hetal cook might also be

129 contentious. Viewers from India will be more harsh and judgmental about how the degree of “authenticity” of a particular dish. . But what gives them cultural credibility is their race, and epidermal recognition. Meanwhile viewers who will not really know the tastes of the original referent and will be happy at the prospect of a new type of food.

Williams-Forson also marks how the “diasporic family” is “informed by common food such as tomatoes, hot peppers, ginger…rice…foods shared by many transatlantic people around the globe” (152). The interesting point to note here is that in looking at just the ingredients themselves, one could forge a cultural identity that extends beyond the umbrella of “African” cuisine, or in the case of my project, subcontinental cuisine, thus connecting cultures. We can attempt to connect identities then, by looking at specific ingredients and how they connect to different cultural groups. The way the tomato is used in subcontinental cooking is also going to link to the way other groups, such as Mexicans and Italians, use tomatoes. This is interesting in the sense that when YouTube viewers search for recipes according to specific ingredients, they inevitably, by cooking these different foods, and making them a part of their everyday lives, are performing a kind of blurring of cultural distinctions, a phenomenon that is a part of everyday life in the age of globalization.

The ingredients for the cuisine that Anuja and Hetal cook typically feature spices and ingredients such as tomatoes, ginger, garlic, cloves, cilantro leaves, tomatoes, chickpeas and rice. These ingredients are used in many different types of cuisines. The tomato is used not only in Indian cuisine, but is a common ingredient in Mexican and

Italian food. Chickpeas are common in Middle Eastern and in Indian cuisine, and they go by the name chana daal in the subcontinent, which refers to a type of preparation that

130 renders the ingredient to the category of “daal.” Other ingredients such as rice connect

Indian food created by Anuja and Hetal to Chinese and Japanese cuisine as well. Spices such as cumin and turmeric powder are also found in African and Middle-Eastern cuisine.

By looking for recipes that feature tomatoes for example (especially if the name of the ingredient is featured in the title of the video recipe), the user can find recipes that don’t only adhere to one culture. They can connect to the culinary intertext on YouTube, and online world at large, thus addressing the postmodern nature of the globalized world, where cultures meld and don’t really maintain their distinct categories.

Food companies, such as Kraft Foods and Betty Crocker, and even companies such as Patak in North America that market Indian food, homogenize these identities through their products. This is something that we should be paying attention to, since the way one learns about different cultures is through the cuisines of different places. The problem of food marketing lies not only in the way identities are connected through ingredients, but also in the way these ingredients and terms, such as “curry” or tortilla interpellate certain groups of people and connect individuals to broader cultural categories and collectives. The YouTube sphere also brings to attention the act of cooking. While it is a part of everyone’s everyday lives, it is still an activity that is relegated to something that is “woman’s work,” something that connotes a negative ability, and that has been taken for granted in patriarchal societies. It is work that is redefined on YouTube in a way that garners interest from a universal audience, and also enables women to earn money, something that is very difficult to do with work of and in the domestic space. The work that is done in this case, specifically by Anuja and Hetal, is also cultural work, a way for them to connect to other diasporic individuals, and also a

131 way to show audiences their versions of “Indian” food. The YouTube platform helps to bring attention to amateur chefs, and avoids the problems of categorization and identity in terms of what are deemed to be gendered roles in the culinary arts, that are created and dichotomized by mainstream television and magazines. The other problematic classifications, in terms of what constitutes “curry” or “Asian food” for example, and debates surrounding this, are created by cookbooks themselves, as I have talked about in the previous chapter. But again, what YouTube achieves is a kind of blurring of these boundaries, and by re-assigning privilege, Anuja and Hetal also help to reassess food and cultural markers that signal a paradigm shift, in terms of how culture and identity are being merged and at the same time, dismantled. In Anuja and Hetal’s case, food is used as a way to mark identity politics and claim cultural agency. It is a way to claim fixity in an environment that, to the diasporic subject, is also unstable and constantly in flux.

Food marketing in the “multicultural” context of some countries plays a role in relegating certain cultural elements to the margins. Moreover, the racial categorization of neighborhoods and the relationships between food and spaces work to racialize cuisine and different cultures, which, as I have previously argued, is what makes YouTube a solace for many who look for connections to the past home, by offering a platform for anonymity and acceptance. The digital platform also breaks gendered and racial distinctions, especially as they relate to the culinary traditions of the diasporic subject in different geolocations.

Anuja and Hetal use food as a way to claim cultural currency, and to assert cultural identity. And finally, food in these videos acts as a metaphor for illustrating inequalities and stigmas that categorize the food of the past home in the present home. I

132 want now to look at how food operates as “language” and how recipes on YouTube posit questions about the ontological status of recipes. Exploring how “authenticity” can be a contentious subject can reveal how the context of the host home also views cultures and

“ethnicities.” As discussed in the last chapter, cuisine in a way is used as a force of resistance. Through showing Indian recipes or their YouTube channel, Anuja and Hetal demonstrate that even though they live in Texas, they still will not fully succumb to the cuisine and influences of this host place. By showing how to make Indian dishes with the ingredients available in their American home, the two women demonstrate how their own work as caretakers of the family is more than mundane. The “menial” tasks of everyday life, such as cleaning the house and cooking meals are redefined and afforded a new kind of privilege on the YouTube platform, by virtue of the popularity of the channel and the

YouTube sphere. Cooking is no longer something that should be taken for granted in the

Habermasian definition of the public sphere, which privileges “critical-rational debate54” and a masculine role in it. Critical rationality is redefined as in dialogue and communication on YouTube. Cooking and commentary about food and the act of cooking become a medium and the message that women such as Anuja and Hetal use to assert their identities.

The cooking channels on YouTube also treat the idea of domestic labor differently than in mainstream television or print media. For example, on television, some cooking shows are categorized as a part of daytime television. This categorization is problematic for many reasons. For one thing, daytime television assumes an audience of

54 See Jurgen Habermas The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991).

133 women who are “stay-at-home-moms,” who require easy entertainment and

“infotainment” in the form of cooking shows, talk shows and daytime soap operas. This distinction puts female viewers in a category that taints them with a kind of stigma that has no or little association with the intellectual aspects of everyday life. Even magazines and newspapers attempt to categorize women in this way, by showing separate “lifestyle” sections for home décor, gardening and cooking. There are also special “lifestyle” magazines that assume a female readership and focus on things such as cooking and gardening, thus defining the home as a female space, and confining the woman within the home. The message these media then send is that there is a dichotomy of masculine and feminine work and interests. Even different TV chefs have different roles and the message about working differs in terms of how shows are structured when they are shown. For example, when shows such as Hell’s Kitchen are aired, the act of cooking here reads as masculine and competitive. Clips from the TV show reveal to the audience a dark side of the kitchen, where Chef Gordon Ramsay violently screams at the contestants who fail at the restaurant assignments. This kitchen space is far from nurturing. In contrast, the act of cooking in daytime television shows is relegated to the domestic sphere, with this kind of cooking being interpreted as work for women in the home and for the family.

On television, “daytime” TV in North America, which mostly targets stay-at- home mothers, broadcast shows such as The Rachel Ray Show, and The Chew, which deal with food in light-hearted ways, often designing episodes that promise quick, easy and cost effective ways to prepare meals. On the other hand, shows such as Gordon

Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen show cooking as a competitive and often violent interaction,

134 and usually demonstrates cooking as something belonging not in the domestic space, but in a masculine, aggressive and entrepreneurial kitchen. The kitchen in the latter context is not a space that deals with the affects of nurturing, care or maternity, but rather an entrepreneurial space that aims to train cooks who will serve paying customers most efficiently. The domestic kitchens as portrayed by celebrity chefs such as Nigella Lawson and Rachel Ray then are spaces that deal with the family as the audience for the food, whereas the latter space is competitive, and has no place for “amateur” cooks. What is aimed at in shows such as Top Chef and Hell’s Kitchen, then, is a way to define cooking as a competitive sport, where chefs are the athletes. The other contrast between Ramsey and Lawson and Ray is the fact that while Ramsey insists on precision and a formulaic process for a specifically designed culinary result, the latter group of female chefs professes something to the contrary. Because they cater to the domestic audience, cooking is shown to be adaptive and easy, something that is designed for home cooks who may not have the ingredients or the means to make dishes that are demonstrated on the shows. Adaptations are encouraged and what is stressed is the act of “making do,” when performing recipes.

YouTube breaks those gendered boundaries, since each channel is devoted to one theme and task. Since each channel can be accessed at a time, it does not enforce a stigma or category that interpellates viewers only as “housewives.” The onus is on the audience to choose a channel and view its corpus. On the other hand, TV channels in this process of categorization, create a division of labor and engender programming and shows based on traditional ideas of labor and specifically, women’s work. “ShowMetheCurry” in particular also provides a platform for privileging domestic diasporic labor. The viewers

135 establish domesticity as their subjects of exploration, and through their “how to” format, establish domestic labor as work to be taken seriously. The YouTube design allows the channel to be viewed on its own terms, and breaks the male-female dichotomy created by mainstream TV programming, as I have demonstrated above.

Anuja and Hetal’s experiences are not only a way for them to gain agency, and to offer validity to the homemakers’ work, but are also a way for them to speak of their own unique contribution to the cultural exchange that takes place in the diasporic context.

While traditional travelogues speak of the journeys and travels from place to place, the domestic sphere is mostly absent in these narratives. Yet the re-homing process is one that is vital to the diasporic experience. “Home” is a “centre,” according to

Papastergiadis,55 a space that not only houses and grounds the diasporic subject, but also roots her in a broader cultural identity. In this sense, the “home” is what the diasporic individual who lives between cultures, or any traveler for that matter, can always come back to and find solace, comfort and familiarity.

55 Nikos Papastergiadis (1998) notes that the concept of home has changed in modernity. He states that because journeying and migration are all part of modernity, home is a force that beckons the migrant subject back. “Modernity begins with the belief in both the journey away from and the permanence of home” (“The Home in Modernity” 1). “Irrespective of its location, home is the sacred place from which everything else is mapped. Our outward adventures are measured in relation to home. Dreams of journeys begin from home and the rest of the world extends outwardly from this radix. Mapping elsewhere is also a homing device. Our inward returns are read as confirmations of an inconvertible dynamism. The meaning of the home has both a centrifugal and centripetal force, it combines both our inner and outer trajectories. Home is the centre of the world” (2).

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The domestic space preserves the traditions of the past home and it is the women, at least in the context of “ShowMetheCurry,” who do this work. In contrast, travelogues are seldom about women’s experiences. Anuja and Hetal subvert this idea, and instead, seize what is taken for granted. By lending their own interpretations of subcontinental cooking, by talking about food and demonstrating recipes, they perform an archiving of culture. As I have mentioned in the previous chapter, Anuja and Hetal have created a database on YouTube of recipes that document not only a family history of traditions for their own kin, but also an archive that documents journeys and stories of hybridity. The recipes they share are also their own personal stories of how they accept and combine the two cultures that are to be a part of their new home. An example that demonstrates

“hybridity” is the recipe for “Avocado paratha.” Paratha is a traditional subcontinental flatbread that is eaten not only in India, but also in Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Traditionally, the flatbread is made only with flour, water and oil, but Anuja and Hetal incorporate avocados, which are available in abundance in their location in Texas. This is an example of the way this dish is a hybrid, in a way that avocado becomes a strong flavor, an enhanced presence in the traditional subcontinental dish. The traditional is altered, and what then is highlighted, with its color and taste are the avocadoes, a metaphor for Anuja and Hetal’s American identity melding with the Indian. These recipe stories become a testament to Anuja and Hetal’s own journeys of finding ingredients and changing them to cater to the tastes and requirements of their families. When the two presenters speak of curry powder for example, or show how to make masalas, they speak of their pasts, of things they have learned through traditions, and how they have changed these things to their own requirements of the present. Each recipe is not only a story of

137 how they create a hybrid domesticity in Dallas, but is also about how the food and traditions are transgenerational exchanges and accounts of their own everyday lives. The

“Garam Masala Recipe,” for example, is not only Anuja and Hetal’s story of adaptation and alteration (Anuja mentions in the video that the audience can always “add and subtract things”), but is also about how their mothers and grandmothers before them had cooked and performed their homemaking (as Anuja mentions at the beginning of the video that it is her mother’s recipe).

While cooking and recipe sharing can serve as a transgenerational exchange, it is also another form of exchange, which might stem, at least in the context of diasporic individuals in the host country, from the need to “teach” others about one’s own heritage.

While studying cookbooks and authors such as Madhur Jaffery, one can note how the intention of the Indian author is to reach out to the American/ European public. In An

Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973), the author explains how she became a cookbook author. When she would attend parties in New York, she would be asked about good

Indian restaurants in the city. She would have to say that there weren’t any, and that the only “good” Indian food was to be found in Indian homes. She started handing out recipes, and also hosted parties, where people could taste her food (3-4). Through this exchange of recipe cards, the cultural act of cooking was disseminated through social gatherings. In contrast to the YouTube sphere, recipes were exchanged among known people. In both Jaffery’s and Anuja and Hetal’s cases, the act of cooking serves as a platform for pedagogical interaction that renders the “teachers” as ambassadors of culture. What is interesting about this is that Anuja, Hetal and Jaffery are called to

“teach,” not by anyone in particular, but through a particular internal voice that makes her

138 want to inhabit this role. They are called to teach but what drives this need is an inherent disappointment in the fact that aspects of their homeland are misrepresented. They are adamant about “correcting” these cultural perceptions, and food in one sense is a trigger and a metaphor that represents the host country’s misconceptions about what they deem as a part of the Indian identity. They are sensitive to these misconceptions because food to them is more than just a means of sustenance; it is a way for them to “practice” what is familiar. While Jaffery wants to “simplify” recipes, the judgment she expresses about the

“quality” of Indian food is a comment about her own cultural identity in the host home.

Her need to teach is both a way to assert her identity, but it is also a way to make her own self feel permanent in a country that is different than her home of origin. I read this need as arising from the fact that she is always in fear of her own fluctuating identity which is constantly under revision and as a result, she fears a disconnection and a loss of her own home.

Anuja and Hetal aim to attain the fixity and familiarity of the past home through controlling the domestic environment, in a place where the outside is full of “othering” sentiments. The problems with attempting to gain this stability through food and the domestic sphere is that the diasporic individual still has to rely on the outside, on the food shops and ingredients, and in parallel, on the advertising and marketing mediated logos that inform the identity of that individual.

But of course aside from all this, Anuja and Hetal’s YouTube videos work by placing focus and importance on the domestic sphere and work of women. The recipes the presenters share provide permanence to the ephemeral quality of the recipes that have been transmitted generationally. In this process, Anuja and Hetal work to make sure that

139 these recipes are not lost, and the culture of the past home is one that is retained and bestowed to the next generation who has a different idea of “home.” But this transmission of culture through food does not only work paradigmatically through time and generations, but also syntagmatically, across cultures. The videos in the context of

YouTube aim to connect other cultures and other individuals who have a taste for similar foods, and who use similar ingredients. These ingredients then become markers of identity in some cases, and also help to create new collectivities on the internet. Diasporic individuals then find connections on the YouTube sphere which provides a home of sorts, a comfort zone where food blurs feelings of inferiority in a space accessed within one’s own home. But at the same time, this digital public sphere also helps to maintain these distinctions where diasporic individuals can unite and interact with others dealing with the same affect of nostalgia that results from the problematic and alienating concept of selfhood that circulates in the “real” non-digital host home.

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Conclusion

For the diasporic individual, home is always in two places, as Vijay Agnew and

Nikos Papastergiadis argue. There’s the home that is left behind and the home in the present. The host home always carries with it echoes of the home of the past. The diasporic subject, while being in the host home performs the task of homemaking, of creating a new domestic space within the context of the host land. But she might also have an anxiety about losing connection to the home of the past. And her existence in the home of the present is a tug of war with the self, to retain the past and to make herself a part of the host place. This tension is constant, and while a first generation immigrant might feel this, her children, the next generation grapples with other pressures. The second generation will have more of a feeling of “home” in the host place than the first, and with this feeling of belonging also comes a duality that arises from the pressure put on them by their parents to remain connected to the land of their origin.

While in my thesis I have tried to focus on how food works in these definitions of home, there can be more long term investigations in looking at how diasporic individual from different countries come to accept their host home. This sort of study entails a look at affects, and how particular communities in parts of specific cities like Toronto, for example, live and adapt to their new home. It would be interesting to see what cultural elements they retain, and what they let go of. Another interesting dimension to this study would be to look closely at the way the first and second generations view “home,” and whether there are conflicts within the two generations about the way “home” is regarded and invoked. While these may be studies that take into account socio-psychological aspects of the “diasporic” experience, this is what I think needs to be done in the context

141 of understanding the cultural negotiations that take place on a daily basis, between those who move to different cultural contexts.

Some of these investigations have been written about in literary form, but what exists is a gulf between the disciplines of literature and sociology. There needs to be more attention put towards the way many actually come to accept the host place as home, and how both the first and second generations deal with the feelings of “in-betweenness,” of being in a liminal space between two cultures and value systems. The everyday materiality of the diasporic condition, the policies that dictate who can come to Canada and the US, and how they begin their homing process need to be studied. What is also needed is a study of home in its many definitions and forms; what is home to the diasporic subject, in its affective form? How is the “home” made? What about the people, the women who make this home and inculcate this temporal and affective duality? There needs to be a bridging of sorts, between the studies of the literary arts and the material evidence that exists of such forms of “homemaking,” in the form of YouTube videos, cookbooks and through the studies of diasporic communities.

One goal that might be achieved through scholarship such as this is the understanding of cultures and their clashes, and how details of “everyday life” can reflect ideas about subjectivities. The “visible minorities” in Europe, North America and

Australia for example are still thought of as immigrants. When third and fourth generation descendants of immigrants from different homes of origin are asked where they are from, it speaks to the fact that countries such as Canada and the US still want to maintain an image of not being multicultural, or a “mosaic” “melting pot” of different

142 races, but of still holding on to the idea that the majority of the populations must be of

European descent.

YouTube projects the sentiments of longing for the past home through cooking videos, broadcast from diasporic homes. The videos themselves are a product of this longing and the need to live within two times and places is something that is indeed present in the videos, as I have demonstrated. The recipes that are recorded echo the need to relive moments in the past, and each recipe that the diasporic culinary presenters share with their audiences is a document of moments, tastes and feelings that are missing in the host home. Food is a literal conjuring of these sentiments of longing, and it is also a tangible connection to the past.

And what of the women in diasporic homes, who make it their life’s work to create domesticities for their families? What of their work, of the fact that the culinary arts fill their days, and cooking becomes their work and their art, something that is a symbol of traditions to be handed down and carried forward? What of the act of cooking, and its consideration as corporeal biographies?

YouTube allows us to inhabit many temporalities and it allows us access, almost timelessly, to videos that deal with recipes that help to recreate the sentiments of home.

The people who perform on YouTube consist of subjects who are also far away from home. These everyday performers who transpose themselves in different locations also project themselves to every corner of the world that allows access to YouTube. This means that their inner domestic spheres become sites for public consumption, and a way that allows a complete stranger from thousands of miles away to spend time with a

143 particular YouTube performer every day. The YouTube presenter then becomes a part of the audience’s everyday life, and a part of the audience’s own domestic space.

Because of this instant and infinite access to people and spaces on YouTube, the audience inhabits different temporalities. The YouTube platform is almost like a time machine, allowing the projection of oneself to be watched at different moments. The database is an archive of subjects and people growing up and changing over time. For many performers on YouTube, this means an archiving of life changes that happen over the duration of the YouTube performer’s career.

This digital sphere is then a repository of different subjectivities, allowing for people in the future to access a person as they were in one moment in time. For Anuja and Hetal, this means creating a live digital library for their own kin, where the video diaries will show their children how Anuja and Hetal performed their own homemaking.

The study of YouTube videos then will enable scholars from different disciplines and cultural contexts to reflect on how making a “home” can influence generations of South

Asians in their host countries.

Because my project stems from my own experiences of being “foreign,” and in trying to recreate the familiar feeling of “home,” I am taking an auto-ethnographic approach to the way I read cooking videos on YouTube. I see this media as influencing a shift that has taken place in the way traditional oral narratives can be considered in the context of new media such as YouTube. I think reading videos in this way shows an evolution in communication, and the fact that videos such as these bring back focus to what is lost, and what is often hidden in the traditional forms of the critical-rational

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Habermasian sense of the public sphere. Within this medium, as with other user- generated forms of media, the “storyteller” has agency and is in charge of content. Even despite censorships and regulations, agency lies with the narrators on YouTube and the way they project themselves and their “texts.” YouTube, as I have discussed in my thesis, is a way oral narratives are being told to a global public. These oral narratives are not only creative stories, but are stories in themselves about aspects of everyday “ordinary” lives. In Anuja and Hetal’s specific channel, the videos themselves are texts, but inscribed in these texts are also specific recipes that are texts in themselves. What I read in each recipe video, then, are interactions between texts and contexts. The context of the home space of YouTube is projected onto the home space of the audience, and links the

YouTube videos in terms of the way “home” connects the space of the audience and the space of the presenter.

In my reading of this interaction of spaces, temporalities and subjectivities, the

YouTube sphere is inscribing new meanings to the interactions between audience and presenter. In the tradition of oral narratives, YouTube brings to focus a telling of

“ordinary” stories, where each individual presenter can share their experiences with their audiences. And everything is up to interpretation. This stems from the way that literary texts “speak” to audiences. The video texts also resonate with members of the audience, given that each experience of watching and interpretation are different. In this project, I have aimed to show how I interpret these recipes, and why I think they need to be written about and analyzed in terms of how food is a text within the context of YouTube, and how food is important in the making of a “home,” where cultural knowledge is exchanged through cooking.

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Although I have focused on only one YouTube channel, because I have tried to show how food works in terms of how many make their “homes,” I am “mapping” new territory in the way that I see the “ancient” form of oral literary traditions being translated through this new medium. In the context of “ShowMetheCurry,” I think the channel actually is an example of how a transnational community exists on this digital sphere.

And food in these videos, and the craving for food of the variety that Anuja and Hetal show, is what is a catalyst for the formation of this transnational community.

What is unique, in the age of globalization is the way culture is transferred, and ideas about home, food and “culture” are exchanged through recipes as text. This is not only a political concept in the context of diaspora, but food is also a personal way to connect different concepts of “home,” as I have discussed in my thesis. One example of the way the diasporic communities on the internet engage in this exchange of culture and knowledge is illustrated through Anuja and Hetal’s cooking channel. While food and recipes are not meant to be a complete encompassing of culture, they are a big part.

Video feedback in the form of user comments energizes this online diasporic community, and while Anuja and Hetal interact with the audiences who leave comments, other users also interact with each other. And because these channels are globally accessible (except for in places where YouTube is periodically banned by the governments of some countries), the interactions take on a global life. The community that forms connects not only Indian subcontinental diapsoric individuals situated in Canada and the US for example, but also others who live in different corners of the world who are interested in the same cuisine that are shown on “ShowMetheCurry.” YouTube also becomes a pedagogical tool when users who are not of Indian origin find these videos and when they

146 learn cooking through this channel; Anuja and Hetal become cultural authorities. This digital sphere then becomes an intersection of different temporalities (that connect the audience’s time of access and time of publication of both the videos and their comments) and spaces (real, virtual and affective). In this sense, the YouTube videos always act as starting points for conversations about the “familiar” and sensory evocations of “home,” and as I have mentioned before, become texts within texts.

That these recipes have audiences reveals the fact that Anuja and Hetal “practice” their own culture within the space of their diasporic domesticities. The fact that they need to share these recipes online hints at a similar need that Madhur Jaffery talks about, to share her own recipes when friends and acquaintances ask about “good” Indian food (3-

4). When audiences situated in another part of the world then access these videos, they infuse the cultural context that Anuja and Hetal show into their own cultural context.

What results is a transposition and juxtaposition of cultures, spaces and temporalities.

The YouTube sphere archives these recipes and provides a way for Anuja and

Hetal to record the ephemeral and often invisible work of cooking. The fact that this is done through the YouTube sphere is ironic, in the sense that the old form of oral narratives inscribed in these videos are now given new life, and possible immortality, through this new sphere. The way this archive operates is such that even while globalization might homogenize specific cultures in cosmopolitan settings, the video archives always hold videos that show traditional, yet adapted ways of cooking. So in the context of hamburgers and pizzas that create the culinary context and common food culture for someone situated in Jamaica as well as a person situated in Canada, this video

147 sphere is a vault of sorts, to which diasporic audiences can always refer to find traditional recipes from their home of origin.

But the diasporic community that exists is one that is then extra-temporal and deterritorialized, given its global reach and timeless access. Therefore, what individual recipe videos do, then, is to enable interactions between global audiences: between, for example, the online Indian diasporic community that Anuja and Hetal are a part of and the diasporic individual of Indian origin who is now, as an example, situated in England.

I have aimed to explore the ways these particular videos operate as texts and how they can be read by audiences. While again, this is not a strictly theoretically framed project that adheres to one discipline, I have looked at how interpretations of recipes that

Anuja and Hetal show on their channel work as texts. I have read these in literary form and one of my objectives for this project has been to perform a transcription of sorts, to look at why this material on YouTube is important. For me, this importance lies in the fact that these videos detail everyday moments, and record the work that Anuja and

Hetal, and many other women who stay at home, do on a daily basis, without recognition.

The affective labor that the two perform is transmitted through YouTube into a global public sphere. This way, the hidden “invisible” work that many women, and men, do in their homes in the form of cooking and kitchen work becomes a point of attention. And because they have managed to make a business out of this work, I read Anuja and Hetal’s

YouTube channel as agential, “writing back” to subvert a traditional vision of cooking and kitchen work, a privilege that is only accorded to “celebrity chefs” on mainstream cooking shows. I also see Anuja and Hetal’s work as resistance in the way they “write

148 back” to a different culinary context, and through this process then, assert the “Indian” part of their identities.

But again, this is my interpretation, that arises from my own disappointment at the fact that work that many women do, who have been homemakers for most of their lives, has never been given the same acknowledgement as work that takes place in offices outside the domestic space. After all, if a woman who is a homemaker nurtures her family, why is it still not considered “work?” Why are recipe books and recipes handed down through generations not considered a type of life writing and life recording, or biographies of sorts, even in this day and age where “text” can be so openly interpreted?

Why is it that cooking cannot be looked at through the lens of biography and autobiography, in the way that the transference of recipes entails an exchange of anecdotes, family history and knowledge. And this is the auto-ethnographic aspect of my project, in the way that the project has arisen out of these personal sentiments. Yet, I do aim to explore how the themes of home, space and identity work through Anuja and

Hetal’s videos. I look at cooking as also a way to trace sentiments of foreignness and subjectivity, in the way food speaks to how one is perceived and categorized. I think food itself is a text, and a lens that reveals not only the socioeconomic realities of its consumers, but in the diasporic context, also reveals the elements of culture that the diasporic individual has chosen to retain, change, adapt and rewrite.

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