Culinary Fictions

Culinary Fictions Culinary Fictions Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture anita mannur Temple University Press philadelphia Temple University Press 1601 North Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2010 by Temple University All rights reserved Pubilshed 2010 Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Mannur, Anita. Culinary fictions : food in South Asian diasporic culture / Anita Mannur. p cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4399-0077-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4399-0078-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Food in literature. 2. Food habits in literature. 3. South Asians in literature. 4. Cookery, Indic. 5. English literature—South Asian authors—History and criticism. 6. English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. I. Title. PN56.F59M36 2009 820.9'3564—dc22 2009017460 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org. For my family, and, in memory of Carmina Fugaban Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Food Matters 1 part one Nostalgia, Domesticity, and Gender 1 Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora 27 2 Feeding Desire: Food, Domesticity, and Challenges to Heteropatriarchy 50 part two Palatable Multiculturalisms and Class Critique 3 Sugar and Spice: Sweetening the Taste of Alterity 81 4 Red Hot Chili Peppers: Visualizing Class Critique and Female Labor 114 part three Theorizing Fusion in America 5 Eating America: Culture, Race, and Food in the Social Imaginary of the Second Generation 147 6 Easy Exoticism: Culinary Performances of Indianness 181 Conclusion: Room for More: Multiculturalism’s Culinary Legacies 217 Notes 227 Bibliography 235 Index 249 Acknowledgments Growing up in various nodes of the South Asian diaspora, I came to appreciate the intimate connections between food, gender, and ethnic- ity through my mother’s efforts to teach me how to cook Indian food. Disciplining me into becoming a good Indian woman by teaching me how to cook was perhaps an extended exercise in futility. But as someone who loved to eat and loved to cook, I rejected the idea that I needed to learn how to make naan and chapattis and taught myself how to make baguettes and bagels instead. I found a way to satisfy my mother’s wish to see me cook while maintaining a critical distance from the notion that I needed to cook Indian food in order to affirm my Indianness. After becoming a college student in the United States, I learned to cook Indian food with the help of my able instructor Madhur Jaffrey. Today if I eat Indian food, it is not so much to remind me of India, a place where I have never lived. Rather, Indian food is saliently connected with my various homes in Malaysia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and the United States. Three generations of women in my family view food in radically different ways. When my mother cooks, it is to feed loved ones and to nourish our palates and bodies in the same ways she takes care of our souls; when her mother cooked, it was a form of sustenance. My grand- mother supplemented the family income by teaching cooking classes in her home; and following the death of her husband (my grandfather), she generated income by publishing two cookbooks in English and Kanna- da, respectively. And when I cook it is certainly about feeding my friends x / acknowledgments and family. But it is also about nostalgia, performing cultural identity, and establishing alternative networks of intimacy not circumscribed by lines of blood and filiation. This book is my effort to understand the sto- ries we tell about food. It maps how food matters, tracing what happens when we put food at the center of critical inquiry. One of the wonderful things about writing a book about food is that good conversations and meals are never in short supply. Precious few among us do not hold strong opinions about food, and I wish to thank the people with whom I have cooked, shared a meal, and talked about food. I have benefitted immeasurably from the richness of these conversations about matters culinary; and while there isn’t enough space to thank everyone, I remain grateful for the kindness of all who have lent an ear to the work that comes together in this book. Though this volume represents work completed after earning my Ph.D., the influence of my teachers and mentors dating back to the early 1990s (when I was a high school student in Papua New Guinea) can be detected throughout it. I thank John Smith, my history teacher at Port Moresby International High School, for instilling a love for engaged critical praxis and a passion for the histories of colonized subjects and spaces. Luis Madureira, Jane Tylus, and the late Amy Ling introduced me to the rich array of postcolonial, ethnic, and Asian American literature while I was an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I am happily indebted to my mentors at the University of Massachu- setts, Amherst—Cathy Portuges, David Lenson, R. Radhakrishnan, and Sunaina Maira—for encouraging me to build a strong foundation for my research, which would eventually branch into this work. Cathy’s unwavering support and encouragement have guided my intellectual and personal growth. David’s enthusiasm, humor, and friendship have been vital; Radha’s sheer brilliance, love of all things gastronomic, and probing questions have helped me to articulate important questions; and finally, Sunaina Maira’s incisive feedback gently nudged me into becoming a better—or at least more self-reflexive—writer, and thinker. The Five Colleges of Western Massachusetts is a vibrant intellectual space, and I am grateful to the many students, faculty, and Five College fellows—too numerous to mention here—who make Amherst such a rich and layered place to think and work. I want to mention Carolyn Porter, Bunkong Tuon, Sejal Shah, Lucy Burns, Nina Ha, Stephanie Dunson, Amy Cheng, Ignacio Lopez-Vicuña, Jana Evans Braziel, Karen Cardozo, Jennifer Rodgers, Neil Hartlen, Liz Fitzpatrick, Sonny Suchdev and Jonathan Sa- dow, my graduate school compatriots, for countless hours of engaged acknowledgments / xi and thoughtful conversations. Sharing cosmopolitans in the late 1990s while discussing cosmopolitanism rates among my most cherished of graduate school memories. Postdoctoral fellowships in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and two years of a Free- man Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wesleyan University gave me the time to think about food and race without the pressure of publishing. I wish to thank Kent Ono at UIUC and Claire Potter, Ann Wightman, Tricia Hill, Su Zheng, and Steve Angle at Wesleyan for their support. I am grateful to Denison University for providing research support to work on this book. I wish to thank the staff at the Doane Library at Denison for helping me track down several sources. Former students at Wesleyan University and Denison University have been a wonderful source of inspiration. I am grateful to their commitment to thoughtful and rigorous critical inquiry. I thank Ada Fung, Jus- tin Leroy, Tara Fickle, Pia Sahni, and May Kyi at Wesleyan and Ayesha Venkataraman and Emily Toler at Denison for several rich conversations about food, race, fashion, and popular culture. At Denison I had the good fortune of teaching a senior seminar titled “Culinary Fictions,” and I want to acknowledge the students in that course for their persistent and engaged passion and for thinking critically about food (especially at nine thirty in the morning). Amanda Dever, Hope Justice, Jennifer Luebbers, Brian Crush, Halle Murcek, Nick Bailey, Brynn Lewallen, Luke Gelber, Jonathan Lydon, Elizabeth Whitman, Dawn Cunningham, Dan Sweatt, Jon Gardner, Jayme Hughes, and Gail Martineau are among the most talented and thoughtful group of students I have had the privilege of teaching; in many ways, this book is for all of you. Among my former colleagues at Denison, I want to thank David Bak- er, Eric Saranovitz, Isis Nusair, Toni King, Veerendra Lele, and Barbara Fultner for the feedback they have provided at various faculty colloquia. My weekly writing sessions with Joanna Mitchell were invigorating and effective. Mary Tuominen and Marlene Tromp inspire me with their un- flagging energy, commitment to social justice, and concern for the intellectual and emotional lives of junior faculty of color. The pages of this book bear the traces of their generous and astute critiques. I am grateful to my colleagues at Miami who have welcomed me into the English Department and the Program in Asian/Asian American Studies. I look forward to many lively conversations and scholarly exchanges. Stephen Sohn, Paul Lai, Tara Fickle, Fred Porcheddu, Allan Isaac, and Gladys Nubla all read drafts of this book at various stages. Their friend- xii / acknowledgments ship, collective wisdom, and willingness to engage my work has been immeasurably valuable. I thank Martin Manalansan, fairy godmother to this book, for his continued belief in the relevance of food within Asian American studies. His recent work on the anthropology of the senses has been foundational to my understanding of food, race, and affect. I remain grateful to Nilesh Patel for sharing his wonderful film, A Love Supreme, and for allowing me to use images from his film.

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