Wong, Carmen (2019) Eating into elsewhere: performing belonging in migrant food-making. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

My thesis posits food as essential, polysemic and affective material within which humans in displacement do, tell, and performatively shape their belongings. It begins by asking: Can we eat our way home?, but theory and practice have complicated this original research question. I seek to draw out the complexities of this interplay between displacement, estrangement and belonging through practice-as-research, which has resulted in two participatory performances with food: Breakfast Elsewhere, and Unmade, Untitled.

In the written component of the thesis I describe how I weave together theories of listening, sensory ethnography (in particular the tool of the cook-along interview), and narrative inquiry, with performance-making and participant feedback in this practice-as-research. This amalgamation of practice and theory enables me to look more closely at everyday kitchen gestures as choreographies that meld uncertainty, repetition and improvisation in migrant narratives as in migrant food-making. I employ the term food-making (including processes such as growing, shopping, preparing, cooking, and even ways of eating, or commensality) to indicate sites of active knowledge transference, a translation of memory of previous ways in which materials are transformed into sustenance, meaning and significance.

Seen through a performative frame, I hypothesize that these quotidian gestures of food-making in displacement could be listened to as a type of embodied archive. These embodied archives of food belongings are always in the making, being inscribed with new narratives and adaptations to cater to new practices, ingredients, or changing tastes. I propose that an embodied attentiveness to how and why this is done is key to understanding the extent to which this successfully recreates the sense of homeliness and belonging.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races J Political Science > JC Political theory
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Minorities, Emigration and immigration, Food habits -- Social aspects, Food habits -- Political aspects, Food -- Social aspects
Official Date:	2019
Dates:	Date Event 2019 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Haedicke, Susan ; Whybrow, Nicolas
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	182 leaves : illustrations
Language:	eng

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