Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (review)

Much debate has taken place since Frank Chin and others coined the term "food pornography" to describe Asian American writings that engage food to evoke ethnic identification. Food studies scholarship within Asian Pacific American cultural contexts has gained increasing visibility in the past couple of decades, starting with Sau-ling Cynthia Wong's seminal book, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (1993), followed by two other critical full-length works: Jennifer Ann Ho's Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (2003) and Wenying Xu's Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature (2008), which further expanded the theoretical, sociopolitical, and aesthetic paradigms of reading culinary mechanisms and food motifs. Most recently, Anita Mannur's Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture has entered this discourse, offering provocative readings of South Asian culinary fictions in diasporic contexts. Her resonant and timely work raises issues about the strategic uses of food as a means to understand how culinary practices function in literary contexts and popular visual media. The breadth of her goals transgresses continents, genres, and generations, underscoring the heterogeneity of South Asian diasporas as well as the expansive epistemology of this food discourse, all of which Mannur manages with adroit precision.

Mannur's book is divided into three themed sections: nostalgia, palatability, and fusion. The tripartite structure works well in situating thematic issues such as "immigrant nostalgia" and the myth of home/origin within various critical frameworks through which Mannur reminds us that there is no simple formula for theorizing culinary narratives. Her book seems to have three goals: to explore the epistemological and aesthetic parameters of culinary narratives alongside theorizations of gender, sexuality, class, and race within South Asian American subject-formation; to problematize how culinary narratives produce and complicate cultural, sexual, and political relationships; and to charge readers, critics, and other food practitioners to critically engage with the culture of food.

Chapters One and Two in Part I focus on how food discursively constructs what Mannur calls "immigrant nostalgia" in the space of home in immigrant narratives. While the concept of nostalgia constructed by culinary icons is not original, Mannur's readings of stories by Shani Mootoo, Madur Jaffrey, and Sara Suleri establish a new critical direction for later chapters in which she moves away from conventional immigrant sentimentalism to develop a queer reading of culinary cultural citizenry. For example, Mannur notes that Jaffrey's An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973) constructs a hegemonic origin of Indianness through a form of childhood nostalgia evocative of "homeland" and patriotism: "[S]omeone had to let the Americans know what authentic Indian food was like" (3). Mannur then explores the links among food, class, and nation that play a significant part in Suleri's childhood memories as expressed in her memoir, Meatless Days (1989). Mannur points out the ways in which Suleri's class position allows her to enact nostalgia while denying the "pleasure of nostalgia" to the cook, servant, and other women. Mannur then grapples with the notion of cultural citizenship in Mootoo's story, "Out on the Main Street" (1993), which challenges the notion of immigrant nostalgia as pure, heteronormative, and hierarchical in its expressions of authentic cultural identities by exposing how complexities of diasporic and sexual politics are mediated through food—in this case, a particular type of Indian sweet dessert.

Chapter Two deconstructs the heteronormative space of homeland via readings of Mira Nair's film Monsoon Wedding (2001), Sri Lanka's Ceylon Daily News Cookery Book (1968), Romesh Gunesekera's novella Reef (1994), and Deepa Mehta's film Fire (1996) by exploring the connection between home and sexuality. Mannur argues that narratives of food and kinship in the home space privilege heterosexuality and marginalize queer-identified subjects, allowing one to frame diasporic cooking as a queer epistemology where food has the "ability to engender anti-normative forms of desire that challenge the notion that home is a necessarily...