Food and Placemaking

Food and Placemaking is the fourth seminar of "Eating Well in Women's Creative Arts Bodies, Politics, Ecologies", a series of eight online seminars that together explore eating disorders, consumption and patriarchy, food cultures and placemaking, cannibalism, ecological crisis, multispecies worlds, and the politics of meat-eating. See our website for further details.

Date: Tuesday, 10 February, 5:00-6:30 PM GMT/ 4:00-5:30 PM CET
Location: Online

Speakers, Abstracts & Bio:

Sohni Chakrabarti, University of Saint Andrews: "Preserving Memories of Resistance: The Politics of 'Eating Well' in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night"

Abstract:

Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night chronicles the intergenerational impact of the Indian indentured system. In this lecture, I will focus on the representations of preservation and fermentation to discuss the tropes of marginalization, displacement, and dispossession. This lecture situates consumption of pickles and preserves within broader discourses of “eating well,” especially when it pertains to displaced and marginalized subjectivities. My lecture thinks through the notion of “eating well” for Indentured women subjects whose food practices reflect the intergenerational memories of colonial trauma and survival. In the novel, pickles and condiments are used to flesh out affective memories of home and belonging, while reinforcing a sense of space, place, and time in a marginalizing postcolonial landscape. By foregrounding traditional fermentation and preservation practices, this lecture explores the ways in which Indentured women’s food practices can perform a crucial postcolonial feminist resistance to the intersecting violences of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. Through a focus on food and memory I conceptualize what I call a reparative nostalgia, where food memories help to preserve multiple and multifarious versions of the past, disrupting essentialist notions of identity, home, and belonging.

Biography: Coming Soon

Shweta Ramsay, University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry: "What Food Can-and Cannot-Fix: Care, Displacement and Female Agency in Ladies Coupé (Margaret’s story) and 'Mrs. Sen’s'"

Abstract: Food is often associated with care, comfort and well-being. Yet the injunction to “eat well” raises a more complicated question: what does it mean to be well, and for whom? This paper explores the gap between eating well and being well through Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupé (Chapter “Oil of Vitriol”) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s,” focusing on two women whose relationships with food are closely tied to marriage, displacement, care and agency. 

In both texts, cooking and feeding appear to offer care and connection, while also revealing conditions that prevent the women from being fully “well.” In Margaret’s story, feeding her husband becomes a form of agency. The elaborate meals she prepares seem to fulfil the expectations of a dutiful wife, yet her culinary knowledge allows her to turn feeding into a means of resistance against a controlling and self-centred husband who seeks to dictate the terms of their marriage. The kitchen becomes both the stage for her domestic performance and the means of her rebellion. 

For Mrs. Sen, food becomes a way of negotiating her sense of alienation. Her efforts to obtain fresh fish, prepare familiar dishes and recreate communal eating allow her to preserve fragments of a remembered home in the United States. Yet these practices also reveal her loneliness and difficulty adapting to her new surroundings. The kitchen becomes both a refuge from her alienation and a space in which that alienation is made visible.

Through comparative close reading, I examine how cooking, feeding and eating intersect with domesticity, mobility, belonging and emotional well-being. I argue that food in these texts operates simultaneously as care, cultural memory and a means of negotiating agency, while also exposing the limits of what food can do to make women “well.”

Biography: Shweta Ramsay is a third-year PhD candidate in Anglophone Studies at Université Paul Valéry Montpellier, where she is supervised by Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak. Her research in English Literature lies at the intersection of postcolonial studies, migration, and food studies, exploring food and mobility and their wider social, cultural, and political dimensions. She holds a Master’s degree in Teaching English from Université Savoie Mont Blanc, France, and a Bachelor’s degree in Mass Media, with a specialisation in Advertising, from the University of Mumbai, India. 

Organisers
This seminar series is organised by Phoebe Chetwynd (CY Cergy Paris Université) and Poulomi Choudhury (University College Dublin), with thanks to Héritages: culture/s, patrimoine/s, création/s.

Cover image, 'Grandmother preparing food inside traditional kitchen (edited)' by Mithun Kunwar, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.