‘Persistent’ Migrant Kitchens: Spatial Analogies and the Politics of Sharing

ABSTRACT

Using the spatial analogy of the migrant kitchen this article makes an argument for diversifying Australian feminist architectural practice and disciplinary inquiry to anticipate other culturally plural framings and experiences of the built environment. Its parallel focus on four ethnographic vignettes offers insights into the ways in which migrants mobilise familial culinary traditions for building ontological security in new environments, examining how constituent parts of kitchen spaces migrate and are adapted by Lankan-Australians in Melbourne and Canberra. It argues that the ‘transmigration’ of kitchens and their hybrid reincarnation uncovers nuanced, temporal, socio-political dimensions of migrant origin and experience indecipherable to host communities that frequently reduce them to ethno-cultural traits. We discuss the assimilatory practices that migrant women of colour daily navigate as revealing the unavoidable complexities within normative constructions of the Australian home. We posit the migrant kitchen as a site of adaptation and persistence in the face of diffused processes of assimilation.

KEYWORDS:

• Kitchens
• migration
• domestic labour
• domestic architecture
• women of colour

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by ABP Research Outreach Grants Scheme from the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne.

Notes on contributors

Anoma Pieris

Anoma Pieris is a Professor of Architecture at the Melbourne School of Design. Her most recent publications include the anthology Architecture on the Borderline: Boundary Politics and Built Space (2019) and The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War (2022), co-authored with Lynne Horuchi. Anoma was guest curator with Martino Stierli, Sean Anderson and Evangelos Kotsioris of the 2022 MoMA exhibition, The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985.

Kelum Palipane

Dr Kelum Palipane is a Lecturer in Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, University of Melbourne. Kelum is a graduate of architecture from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka with experience in practices across Melbourne and Colombo. She was awarded her PhD by Creative Works from the University of Melbourne in 2016. Through her research and teaching, Kelum investigates how creative ethnographic methods can inform design in demographically complex urban conditions.