À chaque recette, son histoire: Viet Kieu Food Writing and the Emergence of a Transnational Poetics

Abstract

ABSTRACTIf the insistence on Vietnamese culinary practices in contemporary literatures of the Vietnamese diaspora establishes writers/artists such as Kim Thúy and Clément Baloup as members of the Viet Kieu community, these practices also serve an important narrative function. Food acts as a stimulus for memory, connecting past and present, host country and country of origin, migrant and transnational space. From this perspective, foodways provide spatiotemporal continuity while revealing the historical foundations of culture produced during the everyday interactions of cooking and eating. Yet unlike writers of the post-1.5 generation who engage with a more generic representation of Vietnamese cuisine, writers of the 1.5 generation like Kim Thúy distinguish among Vietnam's regional culinary traditions. The resulting narrative, of which Mãn (2013) is an example, recognizes and respects the diversity of Vietnamese identity that simultaneously resists and embraces cross-cultural contact and exchange. In light of these observations, this article demonstrates that ethnic foodways in Francophone Viet Kieu literature can emphasize both the global and the local, and explore how food, as a cultural signifier, and the Viet Kieu subject, as a consumer and/or producer of this signifier, can engender a transnational poetics.