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10. Migration, Transnational Cuisines, and Invisible Ethnics

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Food in Time and Place
This chapter is in the book Food in Time and Place
209Territorial presumptions about culture have been challenged by research on interconnected histories, borderlands, and oceans.1 Drawing on that work, I contend that food traditions are as much a matter of movement and emplacement, as they are of roots. National fi gures often excise migrants from their cultural sphere with arguments about belonging, yet the construction of place-based food cultures, developed without acknowledging the signifi cance of immigrant habitation, can produce virulent locavorism. For instance, Northern Leaguers in Italy mobilize around slogans of “polenta, not couscous” to exclude doner kebab sellers from the city-center in Lucca, and Mikkel Dencker, of the Danish People’s Party, has bolstered his campaign against the loss of Danish identity with anxieties about a few kindergartens that have removed pork meatballs from their lunch menus.2 It will be diffi cult to resist the elective affi nity between the purity of local cultures and ethnic cleansing, unless transna-tional fl ows of people are accounted for in our analysis of food.3 Within this context, the role of migrants in the U.S. food system and cultural order is evocative of the possibilities of rootlessness. This essay relies upon a number of recent studies regarding immigrant foodways in the United States to reframe the emerging conversation, and through that reorientation to make ethnic subjects legible to scholarly analysis.The constitution of gustatory identity, typically with nation as its preeminent center and province as its conjoined peripheral twin, must elide the transient transnational to maintain a territorial focus. Dominant chapter 10Migration, Transnational Cuisines, and Invisible Ethnicskrishnendu Ray
© 2019 University of California Press, Berkeley

209Territorial presumptions about culture have been challenged by research on interconnected histories, borderlands, and oceans.1 Drawing on that work, I contend that food traditions are as much a matter of movement and emplacement, as they are of roots. National fi gures often excise migrants from their cultural sphere with arguments about belonging, yet the construction of place-based food cultures, developed without acknowledging the signifi cance of immigrant habitation, can produce virulent locavorism. For instance, Northern Leaguers in Italy mobilize around slogans of “polenta, not couscous” to exclude doner kebab sellers from the city-center in Lucca, and Mikkel Dencker, of the Danish People’s Party, has bolstered his campaign against the loss of Danish identity with anxieties about a few kindergartens that have removed pork meatballs from their lunch menus.2 It will be diffi cult to resist the elective affi nity between the purity of local cultures and ethnic cleansing, unless transna-tional fl ows of people are accounted for in our analysis of food.3 Within this context, the role of migrants in the U.S. food system and cultural order is evocative of the possibilities of rootlessness. This essay relies upon a number of recent studies regarding immigrant foodways in the United States to reframe the emerging conversation, and through that reorientation to make ethnic subjects legible to scholarly analysis.The constitution of gustatory identity, typically with nation as its preeminent center and province as its conjoined peripheral twin, must elide the transient transnational to maintain a territorial focus. Dominant chapter 10Migration, Transnational Cuisines, and Invisible Ethnicskrishnendu Ray
© 2019 University of California Press, Berkeley

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vi
  3. List of Illustrations viii
  4. Acknowledgments ix
  5. Preface xi
  6. Introduction: Food History as a Field 1
  7. Part One. Regional Histories
  8. 1. Premodern Europe 21
  9. 2. China 41
  10. 3. India 68
  11. 4. Out of Africa: A Brief Guide to African Food History 95
  12. 5. Middle Eastern Food History 107
  13. 6. Latin American Food between Export Liberalism and the Vía Campesina 120
  14. 7. Food and the Material Origins of Early America 142
  15. 8. Food in Recent U.S. History 165
  16. 9. Influence, Sources, and African Diaspora Foodways 188
  17. 10. Migration, Transnational Cuisines, and Invisible Ethnics 209
  18. Part Two. Cuisine
  19. 11. The French Invention of Modern Cuisine 233
  20. 12. Restaurants 253
  21. 13. Cookbooks as Resources for Social History 276
  22. Part Three. Problems
  23. 14. The Revolt against Homogeneity 303
  24. 15. Food and Popular Culture 322
  25. 16. Post-1945 Global Food Developments 340
  26. Contributors 365
  27. Index 369
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https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520959347-014

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vi
  3. List of Illustrations viii
  4. Acknowledgments ix
  5. Preface xi
  6. Introduction: Food History as a Field 1
  7. Part One. Regional Histories
  8. 1. Premodern Europe 21
  9. 2. China 41
  10. 3. India 68
  11. 4. Out of Africa: A Brief Guide to African Food History 95
  12. 5. Middle Eastern Food History 107
  13. 6. Latin American Food between Export Liberalism and the Vía Campesina 120
  14. 7. Food and the Material Origins of Early America 142
  15. 8. Food in Recent U.S. History 165
  16. 9. Influence, Sources, and African Diaspora Foodways 188
  17. 10. Migration, Transnational Cuisines, and Invisible Ethnics 209
  18. Part Two. Cuisine
  19. 11. The French Invention of Modern Cuisine 233
  20. 12. Restaurants 253
  21. 13. Cookbooks as Resources for Social History 276
  22. Part Three. Problems
  23. 14. The Revolt against Homogeneity 303
  24. 15. Food and Popular Culture 322
  25. 16. Post-1945 Global Food Developments 340
  26. Contributors 365
  27. Index 369
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