Abstract
Coined by Parama Roy, gastropoetics is a term and analytic practice that has been adopted by scholars in the field of postcolonial studies to foreground the unique relationships that communities have with their cuisines—specifically the processes of growing, cooking, and eating food—and the sensory/spatial impacts of such practices. Although ethnographic studies on refugee communities have acknowledged refugees’ reliance on food to create a sense of home in exile, the study of gastropoetics in refugee contexts remains to be explored. This paper problematises the practice of gastropoetics – highlighting how the practice has romanticised spaces and the role of the senses within those spaces – and to demonstrate how the practice can be utilised to analyse representations of refugee domestic spaces. This paper examines representations of the sensory aspects of refugee homemaking practices in the UK in the cookbook A Taste of Home: Home-cooked recipes from Syrian refugees living in the UK (2020) and Helen Taylor’s ethnographic work, Refugees and the Meaning of Home (2015). This article examines how the cookbook and ethnographic text represent the significance of taste in the process of refugee homemaking; and explores the ways in which cooking contributes to the creation of sanctuary their domestic spaces in the UK.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus–Making Sense from Taste: Quality, Context, Community
KEYWORDS
Food, Homemaking, Refugees, UK, Representation, Refugee Cookbooks
