Food blogs and the digital reimagination of South Asian diasporic publics

Abstract

Using the vivid appeal of photographs and text, South Asian diasporic bloggers present the pleasures of traditional recipes of regional Indian food. While the bloggers offer individual reminiscences about home, homeland and the comfort of home-cooked meals, the blog serves as a cultural form that works within a circulatory matrix where new configurations of cosmopolitan sociality are being constituted. In the transnational intimacies of the virtual kitchen, the bloggers create a culinary archive that mines regional details and local origins only to go beyond and forge broader culinary publics. Building linkages within prescribed templates, the blogs signify a new moment in the globalization of Indian regional food and a digital turn in the formation of networks of sociality and a strategic distribution of diasporic publics.

Keywords:

• South Asian
• diaspora
• women
• digital
• Indian food
• food blogs
• publics
• transnational

Acknowledgments

I thank the authors of these blogs who so generously gave me their time. I thank Laura Norén for her astute input on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes on contributor

Radha S. Hegde is Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her research and teaching center on gender, globalization, migration and global media flows. Her edited book, Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media Cultures was published by NYU Press in July 2011. She is currently co-editor of the journal Feminist Media Studies.

Notes

1. On the notion of circulation, I draw on Gaonkar and Povinelli (2003) and am indebted to the work of Breckenridge (1995) and Appadurai (1996).

2. Warner (2002, 8) writes that we recognize people we do not know as members of our world because we are related to them as ‘transient participants in common publics’. Through the circulation of text and digital maneuvers, smaller communities of affect emerge. Here, I make a scalar and affective distinction between publics and community.

3. More recently, there is a shift towards microblogging, as noted by Lenhartand Fox (2006).

4. On the reproduction of racial politics in the food blog space, see Mannur (2013).

5. Foodworld, a food blog aggregator, maintained by one of the bloggers, lists blogs on Indian food written mainly by South Asian bloggers. Accessed October 17, 2012. http://foodworld.redchillies.us/.

6. In the Indian context where dining across caste boundaries might be a delicate matter, Appadurai (1988, 7) writes recipes move where people may not. Here, we see a global variation. See also Mannur (2005).

7. On the disconnect between exoticized perceptions of cultural products and the life of immigrants, see Rubin and Melnick (2007).