‘Food for thought’: filmic recipes for New Zealand's multiculturalism

Abstract

Through the analysis of Fleeting Beauty (2004) by Virginia Pitts, Eating Sausage (2004) by Zia Mandviwalla and Coffee and Allah (2007) by Sima Urale, three short films whose plots revolve around food and drink, I consider recent debates concerning Aotearoa/New Zealand's increasing ethnic and cultural diversity and its filmic representations. My argument is that these films can be read metaphorically as attempts to nourish current social and political discussions about the incorporation of the ‘multicultural ingredient’ into the official ‘bicultural recipe’, rejecting the superficial celebrations of culinary difference often found in multicultural schemes. These works reflect a range of diasporic experiences using ethnic food and drink to bypass cosmopolitan patterns of consumption and announce the potential of food preparation and sharing for the establishment of intercultural communication and viable multicultural formulae.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Shuchi Kothari for reading my work and providing answers to all my questions, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

^1. The label ‘Asian’ is officially employed to refer to New Zealand citizens of diverse origins, but the majority of the New Zealand Asian population (9.2%, according to the 2006 census) is of Chinese and Indian descent. I employ the term strategically, aware that it does not account for the internal differences within a community that comprises newly arrived migrants from diverse countries as well as New Zealanders of Asian descent whose presence in New Zealand goes back to the nineteenth century. The Pacific community, nowadays New Zealand's fastest growing ethnic group, is equally diverse, with first-generation migrants who arrived in the 1950s responding to governmental demand for labour and subsequent generations of New Zealand born Pacific peoples. The Pacific community amounts to 6.9% of the population, but it is estimated that, due to the high birth rates and the continuous migration flows, it will reach 12% by the year 2051; see Statistics New Zealand/Tatauranga Aotearoa (2012).

^2. Rangoli is a traditional Indian art used to decorate the entrance of houses with colourful patterns created with different materials, such as petals and grounded powder.

^3. The New Zealand Film Commission supplied post-production funding once the film was accepted into an A-list international festival, the only criteria for the post-production funding of short films.

^4. Smith makes a similar analysis of Apron Strings (2008) – a feature film written by Kothari and directed by Sima Urale, which also revolves around food and Indian culture. In her words, Apron Strings negotiates the tensions between mainstream and alternative views on Indian identity by utilizing exotic material, ‘not only to underscore the persistence of ethnic and gendered stereotyping but […] also [to] demonstrate the possibilities of redeploying the exoticist discourses for alternate ends’ (2010, 137).

^5. Zia Mandviwalla's 2010 short film Amadi, about a Rwandan refugee, explores similar issues.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paloma Fresno-Calleja

Paloma Fresno-Calleja is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain. Her main field of research is New Zealand and Pacific literatures.