H Kashdan Dissertation Eating Elsewhere
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Eating Elsewhere: Food and Migration in the Contemporary Mediterranean by Harry Eli Kashdan A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Comparative Literature) in the University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Professor Karla Mallette, Chair Associate Professor Pamela Ballinger Associate Professor Carol Bardenstein Professor Tomoko Masuzawa Assistant Professor Devi Mays “Food is life. Life is God and the food of the Mediterranean is God.” Mediterranean Diary, Raffaele Nigro Harry Eli Kashdan [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-9844-5671 © Harry Eli Kashdan 2018 ACKNOLWEDGEMENTS Over my time at Michigan I have had the privilege of working with some of the most generous and intelligent scholars one could ever hope to meet. The members of my committee were constant sources of inspiration as I completed this project. My thanks above all to Karla Mallette, my dissertation chair, who always understood what I wanted to say (and why I thought it was important to say it), who never shied away from a food pun, and whose own prose is a continual reminder that what I have to write and what I want to write can be the same. Pamela Ballinger guided me through my prelims and never begrudged this literature student his dilettantish interest in anthropology. Carol Bardenstein always asked the questions I was afraid to be asked; her insistence on precision and rigor of argument made this project immeasurably better. Tomoko Masuzawa pushed me to clarify the theoretical stakes of my work at a crucial early stage, and helped me remain legible to non-specialists. Last, but not least, a man could not ask for a better writing partner than Devi Mays, who was admirably patient with the silly questions one cannot help asking of one’s advisor when she is sitting so conveniently across the table. From Michigan’s Department of Comparative Literature I must thank Kader Konuk and Vassilis Lambropoulos, who mentored me in my first year, Catherine Brown, whose writing inspires me, and Frieda Ekotto, for the wine and cheese and conversation. Yopie Prins, who was chair of the department when I began my doctorate and is chair again as I finish, was one of the first to see the potential of combining Italian and Arabic. With customary insight, she once ii suggested that I wait until I began teaching before I judged my fitness for the academy. She was, of course, correct. It would be impossible to speak of Comparative Literature at Michigan without mention as well of Nancy Harris and Joe Johnson, Paula Frank and Katie Horne, and Judy Gray. Nothing would be possible without them. My second home at Michigan was found with the Meditopos workshop, which became the major site for my intellectual development over my first five years of graduate school. Karla Mallette and Pam Ballinger were both intimately involved with the workshop, and my thanks are similarly due to Michèle Hannoosh and Artemis Leontis for their support. The graduate students involved have been too many to name, but I cannot pass without mentioning Susan Abraham, Peter Kitlas, and William Stroebel, all of whom are a joy to know and were invaluable colleagues in planning Meditopos conferences and events. Special thanks to Ido Admon, Lauren Benjamin, Frank Castiglione, Etienne Charriere, Gen Creedon, Noah Gardiner, Olga Greco, Leigh Korey, Hilary Levinson, Nancy Linthicum, Lizzy Mathie, Richard Pierre, and Shannon Winston for their friendship, collaboration, and commiseration. And I cannot forget Rose Benjamin, Anna Faye Pierre, Giota Tachtara, and Stephen Wade, who helped make Ann Arbor feel like home. Special thanks are reserved for Mélissa Gélinas, my cohort-mate, confidante, and constant companion over the past six-and-a- half years. On an institutional level, I owe a good deal to the University of Michigan’s Department of Comparative Literature, the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, the Rackham Graduate School, and the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies for generously funding various aspects of my graduate study. Outside of Michigan, I am grateful to Brian Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita for their ongoing work with the Mediterranean Seminar and for welcoming me to iii several of the Seminar’s events. When I was struggling with the direction of my fourth chapter, a phone call with Lois Dubin helped me evaluate the possibilities more lucidly. My language teachers at the International Language Institute in Cairo, the Jerusalem Study Center of Al-Quds University, Middlebury College’s Summer Arabic School, the Università per stranieri in Perugia, and the University of Haifa are all deserving of thanks as well. In my first semester of college, I took a course on the 1,001 Nights with Elliott Colla, which led in turn to a course on Levantine cities taught by Professor Colla alongside Marinos Pourgouris, and thence to a seminar on modern identity in the Mediterranean, with Professor Pourgouris and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg. One could draw a direct line from those classes to many of the major questions underlying this dissertation. My thanks to Elliott, Marinos, and Suzanne for setting me on this path. Mickey Erickson patiently listened when I read aloud, and never failed to have a comment of unusual insight to offer. My parents, Alan and Davida, refrained from suggesting that I use my newfound expertise on Mediterranean cuisine to open a specialty foods store, for which fact I am eternally grateful. And, finally, my thanks to my sisters, Kate and Alix, for continuing to dine out with me even after I became insufferable around menus. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT vii CHAPTER I. Introduction 1 Mediterranean Studies 5 Food Studies 12 Movement in the Contemporary Mediterranean 17 Methodologies and Theoretical Frameworks 24 Outline of the Dissertation 29 II. Beyond Proust’s Madeleine: Food and Memory 33 Mnemonic Madeleine 34 Ful Medames 40 Pasta, Pizza, and Persian Feasts 52 Ful, Revisited 59 III. Eating to Become 73 “Identity” and “Identification” 74 Insalata Russa 78 Cappuccino, Cornetto, and Corriere 89 v Counter-Narratives of Assimilation 102 IV. Hunger 111 On “Hunger” 114 Sweet Enemies 119 Shrapnel Rice 130 Food and Not-Food 149 V. Against Fusion: A Case Study of Sephardi Food 164 Historical Background 166 Beaujolais and Turkish Coffee 172 Passover Kadaif 193 VI. Conclusion 213 BIBLIOGRAPHY 219 vi ABSTRACT This project addresses the uses of food in contemporary Mediterranean literature and film, and the positioning of the culinary as an index of assimilation in the stories of Mediterranean migrants, refugees, and other dislocated persons. “Eating Elsewhere: Food and Migration in the Contemporary Mediterranean” builds on work from the field of food studies to develop a framework for writing about food from a literary, rather than anthropological or sociological perspective. Scholars of food studies have largely neglected literature, and literary analyses have rarely addressed food writing as more than an indicator of historical reality. This research brings together readings of contemporary cookbooks, novels, memoirs, and films in Italian, Arabic, French, and English to posit that the Mediterranean is a zone of proximate otherness, where polities maintain distinct local cultures even while honoring their common history as nodes in Mediterranean trade routes and empires. Food – the famous Mediterranean diet – is what Mediterranean societies profess to continue to share, but it is also a site where each culture stakes its claim to a unique heritage. I argue that within the space of the Mediterranean, food from these distinct yet connected regions stands as an object of irreducible otherness, alternately yearned after and abhorred. Despite claims that from within the field of Mediterranean studies that the Mediterranean as a salient, meaningful regional perspective loses its interpretive power by the late modern period, I argue for the persistent relevance of a Mediterranean framework for understanding movement around the sea since World War II. Although its present configuration lacks cultural vii and political unity, this work on food in migration narratives shows that the Mediterranean continues to serve as one of the world’s crossroads, where the other is the neighbor, almost indistinguishable from the self. If the legal and physical hardships of migration reinforce the splits between North and South, and West and East, a Mediterranean perspective blurs these divisions, presenting an alternative to Eurocentric and area studies frameworks. In the modern and contemporary eras, the Mediterranean offers a way of disrupting the received geographies of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East in order to institute new possibilities for comparison. Building a theory of the contemporary Mediterranean encourages multi-directional readings which open new avenues for thinking through the possibilities and ramifications of intercultural contact in the current age. Following an introduction to the methodological, historical, and theoretical stakes of Mediterranean studies and food studies, three chapters of this dissertation consider Mediterranean food culture through the lenses of memory and nostalgia in Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968) and Kamāl Raḥīm’s Days of the Diaspora (2008), identification in Amara Lakhous’ Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2006) and Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love (2009), and hunger in Raffaele Nigro’s Mediterranean Diary, Ḥanān al Shaykh’s Beirut Post (1992, English translation published as Beirut Blues) and Muḥammad Shukrī’s For Bread Alone (1973) The final body chapter marshals all of these concepts for a case study of Sephardi food in the Levant as depicted in Edgar Morin’s Vidal and His Family (1989), and André Aciman’s Out of Egypt (1994). Keywords: Mediterranean studies, food studies, Sephardi Jewish studies, identity and identification, memory and nostalgia, hunger, migration, contemporary, comparative literature, narrative, film. viii CHAPTER I Introduction If the Mediterranean was ever an entirely unified zone – culturally, politically, religiously, linguistically – that time is past.