Kebab in London: Transnational Experiences and the Role of Food in Yadé Kara’s Cafe Cyprus

This article examines the role of food in the context of transnational experiences in Yadé Kara’s 2008 novel Cafe Cyprus. Food, I submit, can be used as a lens for understanding global processes, and culinary changes are a good indicator of social and cultural developments within communities. Cafe Cyprus’s protagonist Hasan, a young Turkish- German who has recently moved to London, adopts a transnational subjectivity that he seeks to express with the help of food references. Discussions of cosmopolitanism (with a special focus on the global-local nexus) provide a framework for my analysis of Kara’s text.