Foodways and culinary identity in Iranian-American memoirs

Abstract

ABSTRACT The current study aims at exploring the issue of foodways in three Iranian-American memoirs, namely, Gelareh Asayesh’s Saffron Sky, Firoozeh Dumas’ Funny in Farsi, and Davar Ardalan’s My Name is Iran (Ardalan). With this in mind, it adopts subject positioning theory and discourse analysis to examine the connectivity between food and religion, culture, economy, individual and collective gastronomic memories, urban and rural food habits, and ethnicity and, specifically, how the Iranian-Americans position themselves and others through food-related practices. The results indicate that food practices and multiple subject positions are constructed and (re)-constructed in religious, ethnic, cultural, economic, gendered, local, national, and transnational contexts. Despite the dominant mainstream and dominated ethnic culinary, Persian and American foodways can live with each other on the same sofreh. Accordingly, in these memoirs “home” is not a nostalgic space but a “feeling at home” in a double sense.