KITCHEN HISTORIES in MODERN NORTH AFRICA a Dissertation
KITCHEN HISTORIES IN MODERN NORTH AFRICA A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Arabic and Islamic Studies By Ann M. Gaul, M.A. Washington, DC May 6, 2019 Copyright 2019 by Ann M. Gaul All Rights Reserved ii KITCHEN HISTORIES IN MODERN NORTH AFRICA Ann M. Gaul, M.A. Thesis Advisor: Elliott Colla, Ph.D. ABSTRACT This dissertation is a comparative study of modern Egypt and Morocco from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1970s, narrated through the lens of the urban middle-class kitchen. Scholars of the region have paid increasing attention to domestic spaces and the politics of gender in the formation of national identity, but with a tendency to focus on written sources, nationalist movements, and formal concepts. I suggest that the notions of modern home and family that underpinned nationalist politics and cultures in Egypt and Morocco cannot be fully understood without an exploration of the kitchen as both a conceptual and material space. By tracing the histories of cooking stoves and cookware, cookbooks, and foods associated with “national cuisines,” I use the kitchen to tell a narrative that grounds abstract processes in everyday material, affective, and sensory contexts. I show how the home kitchen was crucial to the formation of modern national cultures as well as the figure of the middle-class housewife as a new kind of worker, and the concept of domestic happiness. The dissertation uses literary analysis, archival data, and ethnography to explore relationships between dominant discourses and quotidian experiences.
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