Abstract:
Several postcolonial and diasporic writers have articulated the complex relationship of food to nation, culture and diaspora, while many others have taken into account the ways in which gender, sex, class and race gets produced and articulated through culinary negotiations. The culinary becomes a site of struggle for both the nation-state and its subjects who are to be contained within structures of heterosexual patriarchy. Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting (1999) is a novel that deals with the characters tragic bid to autonomy from parental and patriarchal control. Desai uses the trope of food to embody the most oppressive legacies of patriarchal subjection of women under the rubric of modern day capitalism. Colliding and collapsing the binaries of India and the U.S., Desai shows that hunger and appetite unyieldingly construct the gendered subject whose troubled relationship with food is in a certain way symbolic of her lack of power and her struggle towards self-preservation. I intend to read Desai’s Fasting Feasting as a counter-narrative to the discourse of exemplary national culture both within the postcolonial nation-state and the diaspora. The cultural patterning of foodscape in her fiction is mapped along myriad gendered lines of power and disempowerment. The narrative recognizes how food, femininity, and masculinity construct each other and how food is used to gain religious and cultural power. Fasting Feasting show how the ideologies of food are reinforced, subverted or rendered invalid through a complex examination of gender within the framework of a postcolonial diasporic discourse; raising important questions about the ways in which ideological constructions of food can act as an index of power and impact the way in which nation and gender gets imagined or contested.
Key words: Food, Gender, Culture, Disapora, Nation, Power.
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