Fourteenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

How is the historical identity of a diaspora performed? For decades, the very same markers one used to identify national and ethnic belonging in the “homeland,” such as history, language, and ritual, have been the same indicators deployed in diaspora communities to demarcate their level of group identity both within the assimilatory, hegemonic, and new national identity (eg., “Canadian”), as well as against other ethnic minorities. But just as food practices are increasingly recognized as a major marker of national and ethnic identity, so too we should be able to use understandings of foodways in a diaspora as key indicators of the levels of perceived integration by such communities. Simultaneously, we can track how food is used by different groups within a diaspora to distinguish distinct identities. “Culinary nationalism” does not simply exist in the originating “nation,” but also, quite powerfully, among emigrants from those nations who desire to continue to self-identify via their “different” foodways. Members of the Balkan diaspora in North America very much perform their Serb, Croatian, or Bosniak identities through the way they talk about food. But there exists a split in Balkan food identity which overlaps with a fundamental political identity: those who see Serb cuisine as unique tend to be proudly, nationalistically Serb, while those who see a common Balkan cuisine are more likely to identify with a federalist, shared Yugoslav past.