What’s cooking in multicultural films? Food, language and identity in British and American audiovisual products and their Italian dubbed version

Abstract

In a world in which multiculturalism and multilingualism pervade every layer of society, much attention has been recently focused on exploring the symbolic relevance of socio-cultural traditions in multiethnic contexts of interaction. In particular, contemporary British and American films often investigate the importance of ethnic food as a key entry to cultural and linguistic memory in immigrant communities in Europe and the USA. Starting from these observations, this paper sets out to investigate the socio-cultural and linguistic functions food naming serves as an identity/ethnicity tool in both the original and the Italian dubbed version of such intercultural films as Bend it Like Beckham, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Ae Fond Kiss, The Mistress of Spices, My Life In Ruins, Eat Pray Love, The Hundred-Foot Journey, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, where the immigrant characters express their hybrid identity through the recurrent use of intra-sentential code-switching (Myers-Scotton 1993) from they-code to we-code (Gumperz 1982) when quoting the original names of their traditional dishes, thus symbolically and linguistically representing the transcultural and translanguaging space (Wei 2011) they live in.