Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Cooking is an art widely practiced in my home country, Peru, which today is worldwide known as having one of the most fascinating and diverse gastronomic cultures. Indeed, it is a recent phenomenon of no more than twenty-five years. Besides its attractiveness, Peruvian cuisine could be considered as a suitable “case study” to discuss some aesthetic-political inquiries regarding the building of “common sense” in a postcolonial society where cultural-racial diversity is ubiquitous and problematic, and has been, and is, the concern of scholars, grassroots movements, and policy makers. Furthermore, solving the problem of diversity is considered the sine main condition for the country’s political and social viability, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru (TRC) claims. Indeed, Peru is usually described as a fragmented society (TRC) where its diversity was recognized along the republican era by elites as a burden that keeps us backwards, unable to reach the status of a unified modern Nation-State, following the model of Western countries. Today this view is contested by different social movements, like Afro descendants and Indigenous People, among others, and social actors, like cooks and decolonial scholars. Could it be that cooks, considered in this essay as organic intellectuals, are positing a way to contribute to the edification of a more cohesive Peruvian society without destroying diversity and, rather, enhancing its positive recognition? Furthermore, are we witnessing the surge of a new hegemony which is contesting the Peruvian elites’ long discriminatory discourses and practices? Are cooks offering us a basic “common sense” possibility, based on a metaphor of taste, that may contribute to bridge Peruvian fragments without destroying them? Are they prefiguring the possibility of building a society where its fragmentation could be seen as an asset rather than as a burden? In this paper I will suggest that the growing prestige of Peruvian cuisine since the nineties encompasses an aesthetic and political-social phenomena that entangles the building of a common sense but with some peculiarities that deserve attention; indeed, drawing on the work of Ranjana Khanna, I would like to discuss the meanings of belonging, communality, and identity in a society where art has been employed by elites as a technology of domination along the past five centuries—of course, always contested by grassroots artists. In what follows, I will firstly trace in broad strokes some features of Peruvian history to give an insight about fragmentation and the challenges concerning our racial-cultural diversity. Then I will discuss the concept of “common sense” paying attention to Western notions concerning this concept and sketching the tenets of what may be a postcolonial comprehension of the same concept. Following this, I will describe the main features of Peruvian culinary art as developed since the 1990s in order to introduce the main artist of Peruvian cuisine: the cook Gastón Acurio. To conclude, I will tackle Peruvian cuisine to deal with the fork in the road Peruvian concern with diversity, which indeed has to do with building a common sense, although one that preserves diversity .