Ninth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

With 16.6 million of its citizens living overseas, India’s diaspora is the world’s largest. In the contemporary global economy, Indian workers move through a dizzying number of transnational labor networks, occupying positions as discrepant as engineers in the Silicon Valley, nurses for the British National Health Service and security guards in Abu Dhabi. Yet, across these discrete geographies, economic migrants are not only produced through the demands and discourses of global markets and historically racialized labor regimes; they are also reproduced through the intimate practices of diasporic households and the affective solidarities enabled by social media. What, for instance, do Indian immigrants in Nairobi eat for dinner? From whom do they learn where turmeric is sold in Helsinki? What might an examination of food and fellowship tell us about immigrant desires, constraints, and contestations? This paper considers the complex interrelations between domestic cooking, new media technologies, and globalization through an ethnographic study of women food bloggers among the Indian diaspora in Singapore. My study asks three broad questions: What is the relationship between food and home? How do immigrant bloggers use the technologies of media and food production to negotiate their gender, racial and national identities as part of the transnational Indian workforce? How do the material and discursive practices of food blogging in migrant households transform and get transformed by global capitalism?