Not translating food as a political statement: the case of Najat El Hachmi

Abstract

ABSTRACT The initial premise of this article is that food ‘goes beyond the need for nourishment’ (Chiaro, 2008, p. 195). The basic assumption is that food is a system of cultural representation. In line with Charron and Desjardins (2011, p. 1), our starting point is that ‘[l]anguage and food define and shape collective identities […]. Food not only shapes identities, but it can also act as a pivot or bridge language between divergent identities, a form of cultural mediation or translation.’ The first section analyzes how food has been studied in a wide variety of disciplines as a way of transmitting the characteristics of a culture, its identities, and ways of seeing the world. Within the context of food as a semiotic system that communicates, the second section focuses on the novels of Najat El Hachmi, those in which food is seen as a way of translating cultures.