In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 / Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and Diaspora Culinary practices situate themselves at the most rudimentary level, at the most necessary and the most unrespected level. —luce giard, “the nourishing arts” The diaspora women who thought Culture meant being able to create a perfect mango chutney in New Jersey were scorned by the visiting scholar from Bombay—who was also a woman but unmarried and so different. —sujata bhatt, “chutney” Behind the assiduous documentation and defense of the authentic lies an unarticulated anxiety of losing the subject. —regina bendix, in search of authenticity In her short autobiographical essay “Food and Belonging: At ‘Home’ and in ‘Alien’ Kitchens,” Indian American cultural critic Ketu Katrak suggests that culinary narratives, suffused with nostalgia, often manage immigrant memories and imagined returns to the “homeland.” Narrativizing her own migratory journey from Bombay to the United States, she remarks, “my own memorybanks about food overflowed only after I left India to come to the United States as a graduate student. The disinterest in food that I had felt during my childhood years was transformed into a new kind of need for that food as an essential connection with home. I longed for my native food as I dealt with my dislocation from the throbbing Bombay metropolis” (270). Food becomes both intellectual and emotional anchor for her as an immigrant subject, psychically transporting Katrak to her geographically and temporally distant childhood home and giving her a sense of rootedness in the United States. And yet, she also acknowledges how the experience of dislocation, modulated by a nostalgic longing for the familiar, is deeply rooted in the creation of imaginary fictions that distort the lived realities of her pre–Asian American life: Food was not pleasurable to me as a child. Thinking about this now 28 / nostalgia, domesticity, and gender as an adult, I can say that food was an overdetermined category for me in my childhood years; it tasted of the heady tropical environment , it delineated who was in and out of favor with my father. I tasted anxiety in the onions fried a bit too brown and tension in the too many dark burned spots on the roasted papad. One never knew what would be considered faulty at a particular meal, and the uncertainty overwhelmed any pleasure in what was eaten. (266–67) Katrak’s honesty registers the affective value of food and smells and, in the process, reflects the nostalgia that structures memories of home for the immigrant subject. Recalling Salman Rushdie’s take on nostalgia and historical memory in his now classic essay “Imaginary Homelands,” she cautions against a tendency to transform nostalgia for the ineffable into an idealization of the past. In “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie sets in motion a complex investigation into the condition of the diasporic exilic writer. As he so eloquently puts it, “It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect the world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost” (9). Seeing the past through the shards of a mirror inevitably distorts the idealized memory one has of a “homeland”: owing to the exigencies of displacement and dislocation, certain memories are remembered, while others, literally, are re-membered. As Rushdie moves us through the problem of memory and mimetic fidelity, he tells a story about returning to India after an absence of many years. He draws an analogy between an old black-and-white photograph of his childhood home taken prior to his birth and his perceptions of his childhood. With the passage of time and movement to different spaces, “the colours of history had seeped out of my mind’s eye” (9): nostalgia intervenes to colorize , or, in this case, decolorize, the past, reducing it to a pale imitation of what it might have been to the mind’s eye. I begin this chapter with this brief, but necessary trail through these two short essays to highlight how nostalgia is always already predetermined , indeed overdetermined, in scripting immigrant attachment to the past. Further, both essays highlight some fundamental “truths” about the immigrant condition—the desire to simultaneously embrace what is left of a past from which one is spatially and temporally displaced, and the recognition that nostalgia can overwhelm memories of the past, allowing, as Rushdie so appropriately puts it, the colors of history to seep out of the mind’s eye. Katrak’s essay draws attention to the imprecise rendering of personal memory...

Share