Foodways, Campervans and the Terms of Mobility: Transnational Belonging, Home, and Heritage in the Narrative of “Sud Italia”

Georgia Wall

doi:10.3390/h5020023

Abstract

International popular culture continues to remediate and perpetuate the link between food and ideas of Italian identity. A range of analytical approaches have become concerned with food and drink in Italian culture: the importance of food industries in patterns of Italian migration and Italy’s economy, the recurrence of the Mediterranean diet in public health debates, the emotive value attached to foodways, and their role in constructing subjectivity are all recognized as fertile terrain for research. Nevertheless, a lack of audience-reception research on the social and cultural uses of both food and food-related media has been identified. Responding to this inviting opening, the following article is based on data collated between October 2014 and January 2016 as part of the ongoing “Transnationalizing Modern Languages” project. Focusing on London as a particular axis of both contemporary and historic Italian migration to England and the UK, my research utilizes selected small-medium food enterprises in the UK capital, and the personal narratives of migration they form part of, to reflect simultaneously upon the contemporary appeal of foodways read as Italian in Britain and the practical implications of meanings ascribed to foodways by subjects identifying as Italian. Positing the intersection between public and private represented in these food narratives as one of the most productive sites for reflection upon more general social development and experience, I offer a critical reading of “Sud Italia”, a mobile pizzeria in which the contradictory dynamics of subjectivity/objectivity and mobility/fixity are symbolised. Drawing on participatory ethnography, the article seeks to contribute further understanding to the multifaceted concepts of “belonging”, “home” and “heritage” by grounding their relevance in practical, day-to-day realities.

Highlights

Ice-cream carts, fish and chip shops, cafés; after World War II, the introduction of pizzerie, trattorie, and coffee bars: the economic structures of Italian migration to the UK are historically underpinned by food [1]
A range of analytical approaches have become concerned with food and drink in Italian culture: the importance of food industries in patterns of Italian migration and Italy’s economy, the recurrence of the Mediterranean diet in public health debates, the emotive value attached to foodways, and their role in constructing subjectivity are all recognized as fertile terrain for research
This article uses not a bus, but the narratives arising from Citroën H van of Sud Italia to reflect upon the concepts of belonging, home, and heritage as relevant to one “identity in motion”

Summary

Introduction

Ice-cream carts, fish and chip shops, cafés; after World War II, the introduction of pizzerie, trattorie, and coffee bars: the economic structures of Italian migration to the UK are historically underpinned by food [1]. The Italian I speak is heavily inflected with an intonation and idioms identified as “Southern”, and it should be highlighted as contributing to a specific dynamic in my ethnography: the self-conscious (at times awkward, explanatory, or perhaps proud) act of recounting an experience to an “outsider” researcher in interview is set against the more spontaneous interaction typical of people who unexpectedly find themselves sharing common referents, such as highly specific local knowledge and dialectal phrasing. Gabaccia and Loretta Baldassar’s Intimacy and Italian Migration [16], to call for the development of interventions which can shed light on how individual experience is informed by, and works to inform, more general social concerns

Belonging: “to Be Rightly Placed in a Specific Position”?

Heritage

Conclusions