Diasporic culinary trajectories: Mapping food zones and food routes in first-generation South Asian and Caribbean culinary memoirs

ABSTRACT

This article examines two culinary memoirs that belong to two distinct postcolonial diasporas, the Caribbean, through a focus on Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails ‘n’ Breadfruit, and the South Asian diaspora, through a focus on Madhur Jaffrey’s Climbing the Mango Trees. As a South Asian diasporan, Jaffrey maps Delhi as a multicultural, pluri-faith town, with distinct (food) areas, to reflect contemporary views of the nation as diversity/unity, and define herself as a Muslim-Hindu hybrid. Austin Clarke maps food circulation within and from the Caribbean as a way to address the issues of human (forced) migrations and highlight continuity in the colonial logics of exploitation. By refusing to trace food routes to Africa, Clarke draws attention to native resistance and culinary and linguistic resilience. One memoir (Jaffrey) chooses métissage, the other (Clarke) creolization. Both illustrate how the culinary memoir engages the reader by offering an ethics of eating and cooking together.

KEYWORDS:

• Diaspora
• culinary memoir
• creolization
• Austin Clarke
• Madhur Jaffrey
• Caribbean
• South Asia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As Roy (2010, 171) shows, in An Invitation to Indian Cooking (Jaffrey [1973] 2014), Jaffrey’s first cookbook, her childhood world was poised between a rather traditional, female and Hindu-speaking world and a more modern, male, English-speaking one.

2. They had been introduced to the New World as early as the 17th century (Carney and Rosomoff 2009, 124).

3. Their research draws on 17th- and 18th-century accounts by slave ship owners, planters and explorers listing or mentioning the crops they carried, planted or observed.

4. Caribbean cou-cou is indeed similar to the West African fu-fu, made in Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon (Carney and Rosomoff 2009, 180).

5. Food historian Janet Theophano (2002) points out that one of the first immigrants to introduce America to her culture with a 1945 cookbook, a Chinese immigrant called Buwei Yang Chao, insisted that she was a doctor and a mother (256). In Monsoon Diary, South Indian-born Shoba Narayan ([2003] 2004) expands on her privileged background and caste.

6. Monsoon Diary also features street food scenes, and a train journey to Mumbai in which the girl tastes strangers’ food (Narayan [2003] 2004, 61).

7. Most editions, including the original 1999 editions, do not feature a separate recipe section. In the 2004 Canadian edition, the recipes feature in both the main narrative and in a separate section at the end.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Corinne Bigot

Corinne Bigot is senior lecturer in postcolonial and English literatures at Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, France. Her research interests include the postcolonial short story, diasporic women, and life writing. She published a monograph on Alice Munro’s short stories, entitled Les silences de la nouvelle (2014), and co-authored a book on Alice Munro’s first collection, Sunlight and Shadows, Past and Present (2015). She also guest-edited a special issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies devoted to Alice Munro’s works (2015). She recently co-edited Women’s Life Writing and The Practice of Reading (2018) and, as guest editor, co-edited a special issue of Wagadu devoted to Jamaica Kincaid’s recent works (2019). She is currently working on diasporic culinary memoirs.