Oral Food Traditions: Diasporic Cooking and Unsettling Gender in the Kitchen at AAA/CASCA 2023

Cooking and other food-related practices play a crucial role in immigrant communities, which take on heightened significance when connections with historic foodways are disrupted by violence, war, and trauma. This paper explores the gastrodyamics of displacement of a Sri Lankan Tamil extended family through contiguous, collaborative approaches that focus on the symphony of sounds—soundscape composition—and the collection of words and stories using oral history, ethnography, and photojournalism. Participants’ food practices reproduced, challenged, and reinvented cultural norms, particularly in gender roles concerning food preparation, and the consumption of Tamil cuisine. Recipes are not written but dictated. Communication is not linear and individual but communal and collaborative. Teaching becomes a process of learning how to think and feel cooking, not just following a recipe. Modern beats blast in the kitchen, challenging the vision of diasporic elders confined to a past time and place.  

Despite popular (white, Western) stereotypes of immigrant communities which are defined only by their allegiance to past cultural norms, the soundscapes captured through cooking and eating evidence ambivalence, an agency to decide what traditions work and don’t, which to keep and let go. This culinary soundscape is situated within embodied ways of knowing and feeling. Theory is felt, emotional. Understandings of kinship are mutable; power dynamics reconfigured by disruptions to place and placement. This, too, is quite literally home-work. It’s based in and around home, both as a physical locale and as a heuristic. Home is a space for creating one’s own safety when the tangible parameters of home have been taken or changed. The space of listening subverts our understanding of the field as one distinctly separate and foreign and dignifies the beauty in the singular, the incomplete, and the intimate. Though the final oral history project will serve as a rich archive, the minutiae of the audio files and the quick snippets from video clips also hold possibility for theoretical and epistemological shifts.