‘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

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

By addressing an intense material site of migrant ontological persistence – the kitchen – this article seeks to explore practices through which migrants negotiate assimilation. It builds upon recent scholarship on migrant dwellings in Australia as culturally differentiated spaces, despite being constrained by Anglo-Australian house forms and values (Lozanovska 2019). The spatial analogy helps us, as Sri Lankan diasporic scholars, articulate our personal struggles with the assimilatory Anglo-Australian spatial systems and institutional values we inhabit. Our intellectual interrogations are inspired by the efforts of Sara Ahmed (2012) and Divya Tolia-Kelly (2017) at institutional decolonisation within the Western academy as well as Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s (1988) seminal critique of the discursive colonisation of ‘the third-world woman’ by western feminist scholarship. We aim to challenge the gender-centric universalisation of Anglo-Australian interpretations of home by describing our efforts at traversing differences based on race, class and affective subjectivity with which, in particular, kitchen spaces are imbued. Our approach is both ethnographic (based on interviews with Lankan diaspora) and auto-ethnographic. Borrowing Annelise Morris’s (2017) conceptualisation, we argue that the four vignettes of kitchen spaces we present here offer narratives of persistence rather than of resistance to systems of oppression, our reactions to living in a social system that is not of our own making. In the case of Australia, it is one that reconfigures us as minority and migrant settlers imbricated in overwhelmingly white settler environments, but with limited agency. Inspired by Morris’s conceptualising in relation to Black farmsteaders in south-eastern Illinois (2017) and her critical reading of bell hooks’s essay ‘Homeplace: A Site of Resistance’ (1990), we explore the possible conceptual salience of the socio-spatial and material practices of defensive persistence. We argue that tactics of persistence in the kitchen, brokered under pressures to assimilate, provide ontological security through the continuity of socio-spatial and material practices. These sites, as guarded spaces of culture, resist erasures associated with assimilation, they humanise (hooks 1990), replenish and sustain. They are meaningful in ways that are not contingent on the host culture. However, the ethnographic vignettes illustrate that these gains are underpinned by considerable labour signified in the recreation of objects, layouts, patterns of use, labour-intensive culinary practices, and the continuous realignment of sensibilities. The consideration of defensive persistence allows us to foreground this labour, a type that is quotidian and typically negotiated by women that could be easily overlooked when considered through the lens of resistance.

Morris further argues that framing such placemaking practices in narratives of persistence helps avoid binary frameworks of analysis and allows for nuanced, multiple interpretations. It is a multiplicity that is also concomitant with the Chicana feminist theorising of la facultad, described by Gloria Anzaldúa and theorised by Chela Sandoval as ‘survival skills’ deployed by certain marginalised people in the face of ontologically insecurity (Moya 2002). Our work is grounded in the considerable scholarly attention given to narratives of resistance in critical race theory, black feminist scholarship and postcolonial subaltern studies. However, the expectation of one-sided absorption into a majority culture’s norms is our main concern. Australia’s co-location with Asian-neighbours and immigrant populations, suggests a tension-filled regional porosity evocative of the settler-migrant-race relations that Chicana feminists explore for the American continent. Among the concepts tested and elaborated on later is whether normative feminist spatial tropes in architecture such as parlour and the kitchen table can be rethought to accommodate lenticular habitations of multiple entangled and transnational diasporic realities (Hage 2021).

The above-mentioned theories addressing specific narratives of discrimination resonate with Sri Lankan experiences both of decolonisation and of migration to a formerly settler-colonial space alongside associated challenges of occupying predefined intellectual/institutional and physical conceptions of space. More importantly, the above intellectual framing helps us enrich narratives of persistence from an architectural perspective on how migrants simultaneously negotiate multiple, historically conditioned, lived realities.

The article argues that the ‘transmigration’ and hybrid reincarnation of kitchens as settings for culinary practices uncover nuanced, temporal, intersectional (Crenshaw 1989) dimensions of migrant origin and experience often indecipherable to host communities that receive them as and reduce them to ethno-cultural traits based on static culinary traditions. These in turn are largely encountered only as ethnically coded consumer practices and commodities with scant awareness of the dynamic socio-spatial and material practices and environments they signify. This article posits the migrant kitchen as a site of adaptation and persistence in the face of diffused processes of assimilation.

Transmigration of the Kitchen

The literature at the intersection of home space, culinary cultures, eating and migrancy is interdisciplinary and varied; however, the significance of home space, culinary cultures, and eating for diasporic ontological security is a recurrent theme (Mannur 2022; Divya Tolia-Kelly 2010), alongside sensitisation to the sensory and material cues that give them relevance and meaning (Pink 2004). Whereas several scholars have described the embodied, haptic and kinetic attributes of memories related to food preparation and consumption as mediated by nostalgia (Sutton 2009), Meah and Jackson’s framing of kitchens as conduits to a past (2016, 517, 520), illustrates the potential of such spaces as analytical tools for unlocking both positive and negative recollections.

The architectural lens on home, migrancy and Asian racial subjectivity additionally raises issues of assimilability into the Anglo-Australian architectural cultures core values. The pressure to assimilate through domestication conjectures an unhomely and unequal environment (bell hooks 1990) resonant of exploitative or patronising settler-colonial relations of Indigenous servitude (Haskins 2019). In such examples, Indigenous women enter the parlour or kitchen in relationships of subservience to be domesticated and civilised by their women employers; relations that parallel colonial-era racial servitude in Asia (Haskins 2022). Beyond relations of racialised exploitation, expressive formal and aesthetic departures from normative taste values in post-world World War II refugee and labour-migrants’ homes in Australia suggest nuanced contestations of inter-European cultural absorption of the non-Anglophone into Anglophone value systems (Lozanovska 1997, 2019). By exploring migrants’ design preferences Mirjana Lozanovska challenges the discipline’s unquestioning advocacy of elite Euro-American and British spaces and values. Such disciplinary value-constructions that seamlessly elevate colonial and then Western values have embedded implicitly racialised notions of a universal modernity in Asian built environments, something that is being questioned by the growing feminist architectural focus on situated forms of domesticity (Chee and Park 2013; Chee and Seng 2017; Desai 2007). Among diasporic Lankan scholars, however, theorisations of domesticity have tended towards political entanglements of home, homeland and nation (Thiranagama 2011; Kandasamy, Perera, and Ratnam 2020); analogies for communicating the amplified war-related traumas twisted into the warp and weft of multi-generational Lankan diasporic families, including in Australia.

The physical transformation of gendered domestic spaces within Sri Lanka and their ramifications for Lankan diasporic ontologies warrant analysis not least because of the high degrees of familial displacement during the last four decades. This article seeks to overlay Lankan diasporic experiences on Sri Lanka’s historically transformed kitchen spaces, the changing meanings and associations of which travelled with migrants as embodied spatial practices retrofitted to Anglo-Australian assimilatory norms. Transmigration becomes evident through locational echoes of certain objects, spatial practices and materialities recurring across time and place. Our method for exploring this borrows in part from Lozanovska’s idea of the ‘twin house’ (2019), recognising that for some transnational diasporic populations – including both economic migrants and refugees – villages, family homes, or those of relatives left behind continue to be part of the affective ontologies of dual and partial belonging. The intimate impacts of these spatially dispersed affective ontologies can be understood through Sara Ahmed’s evocation of ‘patterns of estrangement’ related to ‘a splitting of home as a place of origin and home as the sensory world of everyday experience’, which prompts her to pose the question, ‘how do bodies reinhabit space?’ (1999, 341–342). Writing of her own family’s journeys from India to Pakistan after Partition, to England, and then migration to Australia, Ahmed describes the complex and contradictory relationships to colonialism, social antagonism, privilege and marginality that stories of dislocation mediate. ‘Home’, she observes, is often presented as an analogy for memory.

Acts of remembering hence are felt on and in migrant bodies in the form of a discomfort, the failure to fully inhabit the present or present space. Migration can hence be considered as a process of estrangement, a process of becoming estranged from that which was inhabited as home. (1999, 343)

Most recently, Ghassan Hage (2021) has described the ‘lenticular condition’ of inhabiting multiple entangled and transnational realities that challenge dominant conceptions of social reality and spatial fixity (7–8). By exploring migration as an existential condition coterminal with modernity, Hage offers a new way of theorising ‘diasporic lenticularity’ as simultaneously evoking multiple spatial and material imaginaries of geographically dispersed home environments which migrants may allude to or draw on. The labour of maintaining families as an organic transnational totality across multiple spaces is equally challenging (125). Those transnational women migrants typified as care givers internalise these multiple modalities of belonging; prioritising one reality over the other in emotional tug-o-wars between familial obligations and different attachments to parents, partners and children split by geography. They speak of guilt, fear of reprehension and the inherent instability of the temporal demands of maintaining divided and distanced obligations simultaneously while combating everyday racial prejudice. In many examples, labour-intensive culinary practices are cited as being cathartic tools of psychological comfort and cultural recovery (86–90).

We discuss here as examples two spatial tropes, parlour and the kitchen table, both of which have afforded institutional opportunities for feminist architectural praxis in Australia but argue that even as they create discursive spaces to broach difficult topics in the discipline and for the profession, we join with a certain unease. Parlour: Gender, Equity, Architecture (https://archiparlour.org/) – which describes itself as ‘Expanding the spaces for women in Australian architecture’ – is an important online institutional platform and forum curated and edited by women professionals/academics that evolved from an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant project, ‘Equity and Diversity in the Australian Architecture Profession: Women, Work and Leadership.’ The term ‘Parlour’, though signalling a kind of gendered gentility, has a broader etymology from the French word ‘parler’ or ‘to speak’, and has both public and private associations with reception and conversation. The parlour was used in Victorian private dwellings to describe a formal sitting room, until replaced in mid-twentieth century modern homes by the living/sitting room or lounge, an association that has travelled with the migration of Anglophone immigrant groups to be assimilated as an Australian norm.

In colonial Ceylon (officially named Sri Lanka after 1972), the parlour was described as ‘issaraha kamaraya’ (the front room), an Anglophile racialised space created during the early twentieth century, late colonial period when British wives and children migrated to the colony provoking rigid lines of segregation between the front (family) and back (servants’) quarters. In the homes of Colombo’s aspiring indigenous elites, the rarely used parlour with upholstered furnishings, the drawing room for entertaining family members and the shaded and colonnaded front verandah were the main areas of socialisation the latter used for informal gathering and conversation, across class and with acquaintances. Colonial officials maintained this last linear threshold as a racial boundary. As with the Parlour’s class association, these historical distinctions we associate with its nomenclature and use, colour our [the authors’] reception of these spaces and their meanings. But, ignoring the parlour’s spatial pedigree, the Parlour online platform’s value is for advancing professional women’s empowerment, and we can see that conversations, even difficult ones, enter this domain. In a powerful Parlour opinion piece published on 14 July 2016, Sonia Sarangi criticised the profession’s unconscious bias asking, ‘Who’s afraid of ethnic diversity?’. She observed that attrition of diversity in the profession is due to entrenched discriminatory practices that exclude ethnic minorities from senior roles. She notes,

Over the course of my career I have occasionally been made to feel that my ideas were ‘too different’ or ‘not how we do things’ – or I’ve been told ‘the client probably won’t like it … […] … .More damaging was the insinuation that certain clients, teams or consultants would not be able to ‘connect’ with me, and that I was better off letting someone else do the talking/presenting (Sarangi 2016).

Pervasive monocultural structural boundaries in her workplace’s professional culture hampered Sonia’s social mobility as a woman of colour on the basis of her physiognomic features rather than her institutionalised assimilation through tertiary education in Australia.

Spatial analogies, like spatial typologies, are inflected by the cultures that produce them, and may translate poorly in a multi-racial society. Anecdotal evidence suggests that for many post-war non-Anglophone labour-migrants, especially for Southern Europeans, the parlour was a relatively untouched formal space with stuffy, plastic-covered furniture and heavily embroidered curtains, unused except for funerals as the only space large enough to accommodate a coffin. Festivals and weddings were held outdoors under marquees using summer kitchens for outdoor cooking of fish, or lamb on a spit. Gatherings around the kitchen table, a space reserved for servants in Victorian middle-class households served migrants and working-class Australians in place of the parlour. ‘Writing Around the Kitchen Table’, a critical-spatial writing practices workshop curated by Hélène Frichot and Esther Anatolitis in June 2010 adopted methods simulating critical minor material practices ‘deploying make-shift and readily available materials, and how together these processes and materials can participate in creating new, even if provisional identities for peoples and places’ (see Frichot, Grillner, and Preston 2017). The framing was adopted from Maud Lavin’s (1993) book, Cut with a Kitchen Knife: Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch, a member of the Berlin Dada group whose art practice involved reconstructing representations of women and contemporary life by cutting and pasting images from popular media sources. The theme built on Jane Rendell’s Site Writing (2010) praxis. The confidence and flourish with which feminist creative practice has brought explorations of intimacy and domesticity into public discussions have created a platform that also enables our reflections on migrant homes and labour, in this case, the welcome or unwelcome labour required to sustain culinary traditions. Add to that the implements and vessels used, modified or discarded and the physical capacity of the space to accommodate them, as well as socio-spatial practices and sensorial effects that translate poorly into environments that impose practical limits on immigrant activities.

But even the kitchen table with its open class-consciousness poses problems for the Lankan lens. Ceylon’s colonial kitchens were highly racialised spaces, split into two discrete domains as dunkussiya (smoke-kitchen. Tamil kusini from the Portuguese cozinha) with its raised open hearth and firewood stove employing native servants, and the butler’s pantry or servery. The twinning of these two spaces persisted past political Independence in 1948 because elite aspirants to colonial status who employed rural migrants as domestic staff adopted a similar class politics. During this period the kitchen migrated from being a soot-and-smoke-filled room extending out from the back verandah at the end of a long storage corridor for sacks of rice, coconuts and large ceramic jars of preserves, to a space abutting the pantry, thus signalling the dissolution of racialised segregation but the retention of class differentiation between householder and employees. Historically, the pantry was the space in which issaraha kema, literally ‘front food’, but more accurately Western dishes and desserts, were prepared by the British wife of the colonial official and later the upper-middle-class ‘house-wife’, in a space designed to store away precious and expensive electrical appliances that native ‘servants’ could not be trusted with. Here was the meat safe, a lockable porous cabinet, and the refrigerator, a wooden box fed with ice blocks until the mid-twentieth century when these appliances became affordable to the country’s limited middle class. Colonial families employed men as cooks and village women as ayahs (nannies) but indigenous families were more likely to employ women for cooking. White employers, unable to pronounce vernacular languages, gave native ‘servants’ Western names, like John or Sally, a practice their staff later internalised and continued to identify with up to the 1950s. Village women, unused to furniture, used the kitchen floor for food preparation as in their vernacular dwellings, preparing raw ingredients with bulky implements too heavy for a table top. Food was consumed either at a separate dining table or on a large woven mat.

A troubling teleology of progressive civilisation emerges across the trail of architectural idioms. It equally exposes the divisive colonial, patriarchal or feudal norms that have complicated these societies’ reception of Western spatial practices. In Japan, for example, the soot and smoke filled kamado (traditional hearth), symbolic of the household, underwent numerous adaptations until the Taishō period (1912–1926) when food preparation and cooking moved from the floor level to the bench top. This movement from the crouching to the upright position has come to represent an internal modernity forced by exogenous influences in an uncomfortable approximation of Darwinist evolutionary discourse overlaid by colonial notions of health, hygiene and European racial superiority. The associated hierarchies were internalised by Asians, notably in interwar Japan when the government advocated for Westernised chair-based living spaces; and so the post-war danchi suburban apartments were designed to have a centralised living-dining and kitchen area after the dependents’ housing built by the post-war American occupation forces (Daniels 2010, 31–33). Although the sofa-set and dining table were among the first pieces of furniture to be adopted, the latter was favoured over the former, which was rarely used (Daniels 2010, 31, after Miyawaki 1998, 26–28).

Politicising our liminality – strategically essentialising our outsider status around our differentiated race or colour identities – offers an alternative to rather than a shareable means for understanding the diasporic condition’s multilayered and multi-spatial ontological complexity; useful for demanding inclusion, but not in itself an inclusive structure. Hage writes that diasporic subjects,

… have always seen themselves as being subjected to or having to negotiate with, confront, submit to, or move in the shadows between the cracks of an already Western-occupied world organized by laws not theirs … .[…] … to settle for the crumbs, leftovers and marginal spaces within ordinary colonised nations (Hage 2021, 28).

Among the concepts, Hage introduces is that of anisogamy, or relations between persons of unequal status, and the reciprocity required for maintaining those relationships (52). Viewed in retrospect, the various above-mentioned central and marginal feminist spatial analogies being mobilised by our discipline were partitioned from one another like incongruously coupled culturally different and socially distinct colonial kitchen spaces in a hierarchy of cultures implicit within Australian identity. Focusing beyond these divisive phenomena to common experiences of postcolonial modernity, this next section leads us to the politics of sharing.

Four Kitchens

V’s Kitchen

When, in 1965, my grandmother left her bungalow home on the foreshore of the Lunawa estuary, in a township south of Ceylon’s former colonial capital Colombo, for a new industrial suburb closer to the city, she incorporated residual elements of her former home into a draftsman-designed American Style house. She also travelled across the temporal watershed of political Independence from a home space defined by colonial ideas of distinction to one that was self-governed, but equally influenced by post-war American notions of modernity. During this journey she shed several entitlements cultivated through mimicry of colonial and feudal status, signifiers by which Lankan elites sustained leisurely lifestyles, such as a retinue of impoverished domestic helpers performing labour-intensive services for the landed gentry in their spacious villas. Unsettled by dislocation, she simulated the habits associated with colonial and feudal architectural features within the confines of her new suburban home by combining the two spatial thresholds of her former house. The colonial porch built for accommodating horse carts was integrated as one 3.6 m garage space in a four-bay two-storey concrete frame structure, with a breezy open balcony above it, large enough for a suite of verandah furniture. The most persistent element of the former home was the dunkussiya: a lean-to single storey structure, about 3 m by 5 m internally, clumsily attached to the rear end of the building and entered through a partially screened doorway from a pristine modern kitchen-and-pantry in the main house (Figure 1). Its wood-fed hearth and soot-blackened walls evoked centuries-old messy preparatory processes that offered forms of sensorial stimulation – of heat and damp and odour – that were being banished from modern homes. Magylin, my grandmother’s ‘servant’, would perch on a low stool balancing a curved cleaver between two toes, dextrously chopping sheaves of leaf-vegetables, and using large woven baskets of various shapes to dry, winnow, gather or sift raw ingredients (Figure 2). The deep throbbing base of the pestle pounding the stone mortar, accompanied by the straining roll of grinding stones produced a unique harmony against the hiss of the fire and clatter of pans. There were other task-specific utensils for sorting rice, for grating coconut and various clay pots and cast iron pans adapted for specific food preparations as well as the various-sized coconut-shell spoons used for cooking. Magylin’s kitchen had a built-in hearth, a concrete bench top with a deep ceramic sink, shelving, storage spaces and wall tiles up to shoulder height. The ‘Western’ pantry and kitchen were equipped with a refrigerator, an ice cream churner, and glass cabinets showcasing modern appliances. The brick partition that relegated the dunkussiya to an unsightly past outside sanitised modernity was equally a concession to its ontological centrality to the culinary culture and familial traditions of the house, since relatives, dependents and servants still flowed through the house. My third unmarried aunt, designated housekeeper, shouted instructions past the kitchen’s brick partition, rarely penetrating Magylin’s domain where a menacing dog on a clanking chain and a black soporific cat guarded the hearth.

Figure 1. V’s Kitchen: Ratmalana House Plan locating the kitchen. Drawn by Dhanika Kumaheri

Figure 2. Ratmalana House, Dunkussiya. Drawn by Dhanika Kumaheri.

My relatives depended on village women-helpers to prepare raw ingredients for the multiple sophisticated dishes that relatively affluent Lankan families demanded. Families milled their own rice-flour, dried, pounded and roasted curry powders, boiled sweets, fried snacks, and made pickles, chutneys and preserves. Coconuts used daily as a substitute for dairy products had to be grated and squeezed for their milk. Manufacturing processes for dehydrating wet condiments for domestic use were as yet unavailable. Such dependencies were exacerbated with land reform and import substitution during the 1970s when raw staples were rationed and many food stuffs had to be home grown. But the awkward migration and hidden persistence of my grandmother’s kitchen in Colombo’s outer suburbs was a residual anomaly illustrating my grandmother’s refusal to adapt to and my aunties’ desire to preserve her from this inexorably middle-class life. Not until marketisation during the 1980s – occurring incongruously alongside escalation of the civil war and increasing exoduses to countries such as Australia – did culinary practices and expectations coalesce as pre-prepared ingredients released women from labour-intensive cooking. These packaged foods travelled overseas to serve populations fleeing the country’s political turmoil, facilitating their transition to a differently dislocated and modified migrant kitchen where both the space and its users were equally disembodied. Many of the class distinctions that helped perpetuate elaborate culinary traditions for elite families narrowed. Meanwhile, employment of village women as overseas guest workers in Southeast Asia and the Middle East and related rise in wages and expectations at home forced middle-class women entering the workforce to become dependent on instant foods. The transnational dispersal of cooks and commodities carved pathways through associated and remembered spatial practices for the Lankan kitchen’s incremental material migration to Australia.

K’s Kitchen

At home, they're confined to a drawer: the spices and condiments that make a meal worthwhile. I worry about their escape, as smells, infusing the soft materials of my apartment or being carried outside with me on my clothes. This sets in motion a familiar regime of chores and practices – opening windows while cooking to displace the droplets of oil suspended in the air, discarding outerwear to be washed just after, regularly washing soft furnishings around the apartment before smells settle in, bleaching away the patina of stains that build up on the white benchtop. There is labour involved here, an exhausting surveillance.

My apartment is one of six in a 1970s exposed brick block in inner-city Melbourne. There is an apartment above mine and one on either side. My kitchen is 10 square metres. My childhood home is a double-storey, 5-bed-room house in the suburbs of Colombo. In comparison, my mother’s kitchen spaces include a wet kitchen and a pantry that faces a spacious open-plan dining and living space. Together they are 20 square metres.

Goods and equipment from my mother’s kitchen have reincarnated in mine. Unthinkingly, I’ve even arranged and grouped them as she has. These sub-assemblages of items – a bowl holding bulbs of onions and garlic, the drawer full of spices and aromatics (hers sit on the benchtop), and the kitchen sink with a grinder, rice cooker crowded around it – form points of reference around which my spatial movements primarily occur. It sits at odds in a kitchen designed according to the ‘work triangle’, a concept developed and touted for efficient kitchen design in the US in the 1940s where the reference points were the sink, stove, and refrigerator.

A mapping of spatial movements and their durational aspects across the two kitchens reveals an implosion in movement possibilities and of reach (Figure 3). My mother’s kitchen have allowed for a seamless expansion outdoors into a covered verandah and appropriation of the floor for messy chopping and preparation. Access to goods pre-washed, pre-cut and pre-packaged means I spend less time cooking in my kitchen, but this is offset by the energy and time I spend in containing and removing evidence of the material realities of cooking Lankan food. The overlaying of the two kitchens makes apparent the collapsing of space, of temporalities (durational), and also, of status. It suggests a forfeiting of class status during the migration process.

Figure 3. K’s Kitchen. A collapsing and containment of spatial possibilities. Colour image. Drawn by Kelum Palipane.

Western feminist scholars have identified domesticity as a valid site of women’s labour, because the kitchen has been a locational necessity for many women due to caring duties, and the gendered and uneven divisions of labour in maintaining families and homes (Federici 2012; Heynen and Baydar 2005). Their efforts to expose and legitimize women’s situated knowledges, allowing for their participation as complete citizens in the political sphere. However, non-western domesticity in a migrant context can use its hidden and ignored status defensively to its own advantage. The importance of these guarded spaces of culture is theorised by Chicana feminist scholar Emma Perez as sitio y lengua, (Perez 1999), a place where space and language converge, where cultural practices inscribed in bodies can be enacted and re-enacted confirming the identities of specific social groups. This is a site of unprogrammed socially produced behaviours; where immigrants can ‘live inside with a difference’ (Perez 1999, 78). She writes that power for these groups lies in this difference; ‘In the difference is the diasporic subject’s mobility through and about, weaving interstitially to create, always create, something else – whether music, food, clothes, style or language’ (Perez 1999, 79). Creative practice has, however, explored the radical potential and potency of typically hidden and unpalatable aspects of migrant food cultures, wresting them into the public realm. Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik’s installation, ‘The Curry Institute’ (2011, Sheehan Gallery, Whitman College, http://www.sitabhaumik.com/the-curry-institute) uses curry powder as a tactile and olfactory agent in a gallery space to assert an uncontained multisensory presence that is unruly and disruptive.

The kitchen is also a critical place where I participate in helping my daughter navigate her dual identities as a Sri Lankan (private) Australian (public). Hoping to recalibrate her sensibilities, I tentatively introduce her to dishes (that she often perceives as unpalatable and malodorous), away from the ‘gastronomic surveillance’ she may experience from her peers (Halloran 2016). Halloran writes, ‘The institutionalized surveillance of an environment such as the school cafeteria promotes the normativity of assimilation through the overt policing of what (and how much) people eat. Students and co-workers monitor one another’s lunches, searching for clues to culinary non-compliance’ (51). When we step outside of our kitchen, our home, we re-align our sensibilities with the mainstream. We become vigilant and self-censoring in an attempt to pass ourselves off as Australian as best we can.

S’s In-law’s Kitchen

Among diasporic scholars, both Sharika Thirangama’s In My Mother’s House (2011) and Kandasamy, Perera and Ratnam’s anthology A Sense of Viidu (2020) explore the familial and generational dislocation and trauma that Lankan minorities have faced. In the absence of inclusive forms of public engagement and recognition for these Lankan minorities, the home becomes an intensified and layered site of precarious ontologies, defended and preserved by various strategies both by internally displaced persons and also by Lankan diasporas in Western countries. In these examples, memories and cultural values are mediated by everyday materialities and spatial practices, and spaces mobilised for forms of cultural continuity become layered or compressed. Particularly evocative in A Sense of Viidu is S. Shakthidaran’s (2020) account of how his grandmother transported physical components of her family home to Australia, the front doors, window grills, and staircase. He writes powerfully of the sentiments associated with these acts,

It was, and still is, an act of defiance. Of pride. A bittersweet act, for in building us a home she was acknowledging what she could never get back, acknowledging where we were not going back to, even as she unleashed new possibilities for the future, built fresh hope into the very foundations of the place that would house the future generations of our family. It was not an act of kindness. Or generosity. It was an act of willpower. Of steadfastly maintaining control, when all other choice had been taken from her. [156]

The bifurcation of kitchen space into ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ or dry and wet components in strategies replicated in many parts of Asia responded as in the example above to the heat and odours generated by Lankan cuisine, especially with ingredients like dry fish and roasted condiments used to flavour curries. While this luxury of space was not afforded to apartment dwellers, detached houses typically appropriated or even built spaces to accommodate these differences, whenever possible.

When S’s in-laws rebuilt their home after the 2003 Canberra bushfires they attached a wet kitchen at the back (pers. comm. 27 February 2021). Prompted by Sri Lanka’s linguistic nationalism that badly affected Tamil minority jobs, S’s mother-in-law, a doctor, had migrated with her family during the 1970s, first to the United Kingdom, where they faced considerable racism and later to Australia to the Northern Territory to work as a Flying Doctor servicing the Australian Indigenous Community. Her husband, formerly a bank manager, drove a bus. When the opportunity arose, they moved to Canberra, he for work in the Federal government and she as a doctor in the public service. Desperate for the familiar foods which were unavailable in Canberra at the time, they would make monthly trips to Sydney for raw ingredients and cook on a stove in a back verandah clad in woollen caps and sweaters in the winter months; in a display of persistence unsupported by either their home or their locality. Returning to Sri Lanka around 1987 they sold their house and shipped its contents to Australia, redistributing the largest pieces of furniture – settee, armchairs, dining table, bed, folding chair, dressing table, screen, stools supported by three elephants, etc., among the three children, now adults. ‘She treasured her memories of a very happy childhood with her mother (her father died when she was 14) through letters and furniture,’ S observes. The shipment from Sri Lanka included a grinding stone, new hopper pans (used for making bowl shaped savoury breads) and a Noritake dinner set, a status symbol in Lankan material culture. Removal of furniture and, in particular, the heavy kitchen implements underlined the realisation that they were unlikely to return. When her sister in law’s family was migrating to Australia, S recollects, they too travelled with granite pestles and mortars and thosai (another kind of bread) and chilli grinders causing the Australian customs officials to joke, ‘Crickey, these people have even brought their tomb stones with them!’

S’s in-laws were aged in their 80s when the possibility arose of this physical change to their destroyed Canberra home (Figure 4). They built,

The standard kitchen that is visible to and a part of the dining room and family room, a covered (heated, external kitchen, separated from the fancy kitchen with sliding doors) and outside the kitchen in a patio – a log of wood was planted upright. A big chunk of meat could be placed on it and my father-in-law could swing hard with his cleaver and chop it up!

Food could be prepared separately in a weather-proof space, preventing curry odours from entering the house and clinging to soft furnishings. S observes that her in-laws were frugal, reluctant to eat at restaurants, and suspicious of takeaways. They adjusted to these practices very late in life finally embracing the convenience of the microwave and accepting orders made by Tamil community chefs by then settled and part of the growing Sri Lankan community in Canberra. S notes,

Figure 4. Extruded Section of S’s In-law’s Kitchen and Wet Kitchen. Drawn by Dhanika Kumaheri.

It was only in their later years that they recognised that saving their energy and ordering from outside was Ok and not an immoral waste of money or an indulgence. He would always buy cheaper cuts of meat, never buy pre-cut meat and pre-cut vegetables (more expensive), and being a banker, he had a sharp mind for mental arithmetic to the very end and he would convert prices to Sri Lanka rupees and exclaim how expensive things were.

While reminiscent of my grandmother’s vernacular kitchen, the choices made by S’s diasporic family were compounded by forced dislocation first into an assimilatory spatial container designed for Australian cooking that initially inhibited the sought-after cultural resilience; and the determined continuation of culinary traditions, enabled later as an exterior practice, a back-stage behaviour, if we adopt Erving Goffman’s term (1959). Their example is indicative of ways in which migrants negotiate spatial or material barriers to integration by creating alternative performative spaces and strategies. The exteriority of this example differs from the internal (to Lanka), rural-to-urban and temporal migration of the dunkussiya, although essentially, in both cases, comparable spaces are juxtaposed.

The cost and labour involved in sustaining familiar culinary practices includes the transnational transportation of equipment, journeying to Sydney for ingredients, and extending and expanding their kitchen quite apart from the hard work of sustaining a moral economy around food preparation from raw materials rather than pre-prepared ingredients; although construction and maintenance of an additional kitchen burdens their purse.

A’s Kitchen

Integrating these two spaces without assimilating one into the other becomes possible only by making certain compromises to propriety, allowing the signifying odours to cling to the furniture, as in this fourth, and final example, where the Lankan home is nested within the Australian building envelope and spatial plan. My sister’s first proper home in Canberra, a red-brick row house with an open-plan kitchen cum living and dining area telescopes the visitor and her extended Canberra family into aspects of Sri Lanka which she has effectively recreated by transporting pieces of living room furniture, paintings and pottery evocative of Lanka to Australia. Her house in Canberra is suggestive but also a projection of an idealised Lankan home, because her house in Colombo was gloomy and constricted by the multi-storey commercial developments that surrounded it, stealing its light. Her Canberra home leads onto a timber deck wrapped around a Melaleuca tree with views to a carefully planted garden she takes pride in. Her Colombo house had an alley-kitchen in which her live-in domestic help prepared all meals for the family because my sister’s demanding corporate sector job gave her no time for cooking. In Canberra, across a string of Australian public service consultancies, my sister has achieved a work life balance through which she has regained control of her life and her domestic environment primarily through cooking. She chats with family or visitors over a dividing partial island bench top during food preparation against the backdrop of hissing and sizzling and pungency of curries, to serve directly onto her dining table, or in the adjacent living space, of white covered settee, Dutch style cane-backed reclining chairs, antique large timber chest and large ceramic storage jars (used here as ornaments) brought in a cousin’s shipping consignment from Colombo to Australia (Figure 5). An antique Indonesian table and stone Buddha head purchased in Australia amplify the interior’s Asian theme. This domestic tableau further conjures her Colombo home because individual interior walls flanking her kitchen were painted in vibrant tones of mustard, maroon and avocado, by the former artist owner of this house, in a gesture reminiscent of the indigo garden wall of its Lankan counterpart. The paintings, removed from their frames in the former locality and transported and reframed in the latter, are works of the 43 Group of Lankan modern movement artists whose paintings romanticised and abstracted that country’s rural landscape, in defiance of colonial landscape painting traditions of the early twentieth century. Through them, scenes depicting Lanka’s village and coastal settings and life enter Australia. The lenticular condition described by Hage (2021, Chap. 5) is pervasive in this example; multiple realities are creatively configured through varied forms of labour; in transportation, purchasing, crafting and reorganising interior spaces to produce affects that offer my sister and her family the desired ontological familiarity. Indeed, but for the native foliage glimpsed through the glazed facade, this carefully crafted material ensemble transcends its Australian setting. Her persistent adaptation of the space displays degrees of the kinds of ambivalence and fragmentation discussed by Hage (8), and yet it also liberates my sister from the class inhibitions of her Lankan peers and gives her a greater sense of individuality and ownership.

Figure 5. A’s Kitchen and Living Room. Drawn by Dhanika Kumaheri

Brought up in a society where cheap domestic help was abundant, professional women of my sister’s generation were forced upon migrating into self-reliance and the associated labour. Her late introduction to the rigour of Lankan cooking is reflected in her kitchen’s hidden chaos. Two floor-to ceiling height cupboards occupying one wall of her kitchen spill over with Asian condiments, an inherited spice rack is heavy laden and large cooking vessels and appliances, the wok, the hopper pans, the rice cooker, the pestle and mortar, the food processor, and the deep fryer, signal the regional proclivity of this home. My sister has gone to even greater lengths to own the culinary rituals that gather her family together by throwing clay and making her own dinnerware – plates, serving bowls and cups – which have incrementally replaced all her shop-bought crockery. At mealtimes, she lays them out on Sri Lankan handloom place mats. Her friend from the previously recounted kitchen has helped her repair her arm chairs’ cane woven seating designed to receive the reclining sitter’s body-curvature. This all-encompassing aesthetic ambience lit by the garden’s dappled light is deceptively evocative of that idealised but unattainable other urban setting where space is premium and gardens are a rarity.

Conclusion

We began this article by expressing our discomfort with assimilating into prevailing and laudable feminist efforts at curating dialogic and egalitarian forums named after spaces associated with women’s activities, like the ‘parlour’ or the ‘kitchen’. Despite their good intentions, our associations with these representative spaces derived from culture-specific spatial norms that are universalised both in design practice and representation cannot be taken for granted. Interpretations of these spaces fail to consider the lens of feminist intersectionality as internally differentiated by discrimination based on race, culture and other identity categories – or, from the Lankan viewpoint, as racialised distinctions associated with colonial and Western (economic and cultural) authority. These in turn translate to notions of modernity expressed through Western modern spaces and practices that foreclose and delimit other culturally situated and accumulated interpretations of space, and modernity. Advocating for greater sensitivity in applying culturally inflected readings of seemingly ‘universal’ spatial norms, we offered a discussion of how postcolonial and diasporic women of colour interpret normative culturally attenuated home space-attributes. Across four short vignettes that tracked migrant kitchen trajectories, we argued that the vernacular kitchen’s encounter with modernity begins in the home country’s adaptation to new modes of living and is transported incrementally as migrant communities become more numerous and complex. The vignettes described narratives of persistence, consisting of micro practices that mediate affective citizenships to Australia and temporally specific generational notions of Sri Lanka related in part to conditions in that country which prompted the decision to migrate. They are suggestive of a fragmented minority that is unable to mobilise as a group due to a lack of critical mass and proximal advantage, and the consequent labour involved in sustaining familiar forms of ontological security.

Although most starkly evident in the Lankan example the four kitchens described in this article suggest different responses to assimilation mediated by postcolonial subject positions, whether in Australia or Sri Lanka. Aida Hurtado describes one of the key ways in which Chicana feminist theorising differentiates from white middle-class feminisms through its ability to hold together differing realities (1998). She attributes this to the exposure to multiple borders and with it, comes an ‘oppositional consciousness’, or la facultad, (as introduced by Anzaldua and theorised by Chela Sandoval) ‘ … the ability to hold multiple social perspectives while simultaneously maintaining a core centre … ’ (1991, 150). This she says is essential to Chicana feminisms ability to form collaborations and political coalitions across diverse, sometimes ideologically incompatible movements. The kitchen narratives of the Lankan women featured here speak of similar exposures to multiple borders, but also to multiple temporalities and sensibilities that have sharpened their ability to mobilise different identity categories as needed. V’s kitchen demanded the shedding of some colonial and feudal practices of domesticity (even while retaining others), as it encountered a sanitised modernity in 1960s Sri Lanka. K’s kitchen confronts her with a change in class status and brokers aspects of her identity by orienting her to multiple aesthetic sensibilities that need careful curation. Meanwhile S’s kitchen and A’s kitchen are demonstrations of reasserting and reclaiming material practices (partitioned and somewhat contained in S’s kitchen but acknowledged and accepted with some ease in A’s kitchen). Anzaldúa describes la facultad variously as a ‘vestige of a proximity sense,’ an ‘acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak,’ and a ‘shift in perception’ (1987; as cited in Moya 2002, 88). This is a skill that not only allows us to ‘live inside with difference’ but it is also how we’re able to build coalitions with other people of colour, minorities and align ourselves with broader feminist agendas. This is how we are able to join our Australian counterparts in the parlour or at the kitchen table, with the hope that they will reflexively reciprocate our spatial sensibilities across the unequal cultural relations that are structurally embedded in Australia’s Anglophone system and manifest in its spatial preferences.

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.