Thursday, January 26th, 2012 Subversion, Citizenship and Belonging through Food and the Vernacular in South Asian-Canadian Writing

Description

Dr. Julie Mehta will be sharing her current research on articulations of food and the performative act of eating and how they punctuate diasporic and transnational Asian- North American literature. Turning her attention to the cultural politics of power, consumption and diversity, Dr. Mehta examines how culinary narratives interrogate racial, sexual and fiscal constructs. Theorising the diaspora, Anita Mannur in Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Disporic Culture asserts that “Food...is also about nostalgia, performing cultural identity and establishing alternative networks of intimacy not circumscribed by blood and filiation”. Dr. Mehta’s project uses Anita Mannur, Salman Rushdie and Wenying Xu’s analyses to unveil representations of food in Asian-North American Literature. Her presentation is a hybrid of empirical research, participant observation, and personalized scholarship. This dialogic session at the Asian Institute is a progression from the paper she recently presented at the Australasian Conference in December 2011 in Hyderabad, India. Her chapter on “Multicultural Tongues”, forthcoming in Edible Histories of Canada, (U of T Press: Spring 2012, ed by Franca Iacovetta et al) explores the crucial but neglected subject of South Asian-North American identities in cosmopolitan Toronto by testing and tasting three major sources that speak to the key importance of food in the formulation of identity: South Asian restaurants and cuisines; Asian-Canadian literatures in English; and the narratives of students in the multicultural university classroom and wider landscape of a multiracial Toronto. She explores the relationship between food and identity in situations of encounter, tracks the rise of immigrant and ethnic foodways, interrogates the generational conflicts embedded in culinary encounters at home, and bears witness to the phenomena of preservation and invention of tradition in cultural hybridity and creolization. Her current research, while informed by the vexed historical context of immigration in Canada, focuses on racialized, non-Western immigrants whose cultural presence on the contemporary culinary and literary landscape has helped define a certain Canadian diasporic cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and essentialisation, on the other.

Sampling of some of the ‘hybridized’ items that are represented in Asian-North American Literature will be a part of the experience at the talk.

Dr. Julie Mehta is the author of Dance of Life: Mythology, History and Politics of Cambodian Culture (2001), and co-author with historian Dr. Harish C. Mehta of Hun Sen: Strongman of Cambodia (1999). She teaches Canadian Diasporic Literature and the Chancellor Emerita Senator Vivienne Poy endowed course on Asian Cultures in Canada at University College. Her doctoral dissertation was titled: “Unchaste” Goddesses, Turbulent Waters: Postcolonial Representations of the Divine Feminine in South Asian Fiction.” A Postcolonial Studies specialist by training, she has published widely on Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures and works on exile and identity among diasporic novelists and is deeply interested in the concepts of home and belonging among Canadian artistes and writers. She is also interested in how Canadian readers respond to the works of vernacular writers such as Tagore and Premchand. Her translation of Tagore’s Dak Ghar (The Post Office) was performed by the Pleiades Theatre in Toronto in 2011. A CGS-SSHRC recipient she was also awarded the Mary H. Beatty Fellowship and the Dr. David Chu Fellowship from the University of Toronto. Dr. Mehta has persisted in propelling cross cultural understanding between borders while she lived and worked as a correspondent in India, Australia, Singapore, Cambodia and Thailand, before coming to Canada.