“Memories from my mother’s kitchen”: Extinction and anxiety in Joudie Kalla’s Palestine on a Plate

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how culinary memory belies anxieties over cultural erasure in Joudie Kalla’s 2016 cookbook Palestine on a Plate. It contends that the exotic appeal of ancestral memory is invoked by Kalla to re-present Palestinian culture to mainstream western circuits. Following an established critical tradition of being attentive to “exotic” discourses in postcolonial cultural studies, the article pinpoints Palestine as particular locus of political and cultural exotification, beset as it is by competing narratives of violent activism and humanitarian suffering. Kalla draws upon problematic notions of self-exotification in order to market her book as preserving an “authentic” Palestinian cultural inheritance. Despite this, and through apparently competing notions of authenticity versus innovation, Kalla overcomes the mood of anxiety that haunts the text and defies processes of cultural erasure, ultimately presenting Palestine as a vibrant, living culture to be celebrated, not mourned.

KEYWORDS:

• Palestine
• culinary writing
• postcolonial exotic
• memorialization
• Palestine on a Plate
• food

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The year 2017 marked the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, whereby the British government advocated the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in historic Palestine. It also marked 50 years since the Six-Day War, during which parts of the West Bank were seized by the Israeli military, and ten years since the blockade of the Gaza Strip. These anniversaries were widely commemorated by Palestinians and solidarity groups across the world.

2. See “Israel Passes Controversial New Law on West Bank Settlements” (BBC News, February 7, 2017), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-38888649 and United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Secretariat (2015).

3. This suggestion of Palestine on a Plate as in part a public education project is further supplemented by Joudie Kalla’s appearance as part of the programme for “PalExpo 2017”, a “social, cultural and entertainment event on Palestine” that was produced by the campaigning organization Friends of al-Aqsa.

4. Ahed Tamimi is a Palestinian teenager who, at the time of writing, has been imprisoned for slapping Israeli soldiers who entered her family’s property (see Laub and Daraghmen 2018).

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Notes on contributors

Shelley Angelie Saggar

Shelley Angelie Saggar is an independent researcher working at Wellcome Collection in London. She completed her MA at the University of Leeds, where she specialized in postcolonial literature and visual cultures. Her research interests include cultural representations of “disaster”, culinary cultures and the memorialization of catastrophe and the treatment of technology in indigenous literature and film.