In search of 'home' in the transnational imaginary: food, roots, and routes in memoirs by Asian Australian women writers
For many people, food conveys notions and memories of home, community and identity. In a transnational world, these relations have become more pronounced as food is one the cultural goods that travel in the global networks of human migration and mobility. In diasporic and/or transnational writin...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
The Wenshan Review
2019
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://irep.iium.edu.my/73133/ http://irep.iium.edu.my/73133/ http://irep.iium.edu.my/73133/ http://irep.iium.edu.my/73133/1/In%20Search%20of%20Home%20in%20the%20Transnational%20Imaginary.pdf |
| Summary: | For many people, food conveys notions and memories of
home, community and identity. In a transnational world, these
relations have become more pronounced as food is one the cultural
goods that travel in the global networks of human migration and
mobility. In diasporic and/or transnational writing, the preparation
and consumption of food often appear as ways of maintaining or
examining one’s ties with “home.” This paper takes the memoirs of
two Asian Australian women writers, Beth Yahp’s Eat First, Talk
Later (2015) and Alice Pung’s Unpolished Gem (2006), as the basis
for exploring how food is deployed in the writers’ search for
“home” and belonging as transnational subjects. Yahp’s memoir
sets out how food and memories of eating mediate her sense of
“home” as a person who is designated an Other in Malaysia and
Australia. In Alice Pung’s memoirs, food acts as metaphor for her
unease and anxiety as an Asian Australian growing up in a
homeland that does not quite embrace her and in the shadow of
another homeland that keeps her under surveillance across time and
space. Using Avtar Brah’s notion of a homing desire, and concepts
of authenticity and hybridity explored through food in literary and
cultural studies, this paper examines the ways that the selected
memoirs deploy food to interrogate the practices of inclusion and exclusion that are part of the making of a sense of “home,” and how
food facilitates new ways of belonging in a transnational world. |
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