Shaping Exile through Recipes in the Contemporary Culinary Memoirs of Diasporic Immigrant Women to America and Great Britain
The thread of recipes which in diasporic memoirs ostensibly constitute a vital link with the past, are objects in their own right, vestiges of a family and community heritage whose transcription anchors the memory of exile. This article will consider whether the inclusion of recipes in immigrant sto...
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| I publikationen: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ilcea, |
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| Huvudupphovsman: | |
| Materialtyp: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Språk: | Anglais |
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ILCEA
2026
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| Ämnen: | |
| Länkar: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sammanfattning: | The thread of recipes which in diasporic memoirs ostensibly constitute a vital link with the past, are objects in their own right, vestiges of a family and community heritage whose transcription anchors the memory of exile. This article will consider whether the inclusion of recipes in immigrant stories is a testimony to exile or rather an attempt to assimilate the memory of exile through the materiality of recipes with their inherent capacity to transform the ingredients and the cook in the experience of the immediacy of cooking.In the context of the narrative, recipes constitute a “fictional” construction of the family myth, while at the same time forming part of the continuum of a wider narrative. As objects rescued from the old world, we will consider whether their inclusion in culinary memoirs is the instrumentalization of a private artefact for literary or even commercial purposes, part of a societal discourse that seeks to shape exile in order to tame it.The presentation of traditional family recipes, their adaptation to the host country and the juxtaposition of new recipes also offer a personal way of de‑ and reconstructing exile. Recipes are both private and collective, a birthright to be claimed and shared, caught between ambivalent allegiances to the new world and the old. As a result, transgenerational transmission seems to occur in the public space rather than exclusively within that of the family. The published family recipe becomes an “open source” of culinary knowledge, open also to interpretation, adaptation and, inevitably, corruption. Does the alteration of these sources and culinary gestures undermine the fragile memory of communal exile? In the context of the fluid formations of reconstructions that proliferate around food, particularly in the context of the displacement of exile, does the recipe both construct and erase the memory it carries in autobiographical narratives? |
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