THe Fifth Biannual Northern Postcolonial Network Symposium at York St John University, Friday 5th May 2017, organised by Sarah Lawson Welsh with NPN
‘Culinary Cultures’ Call for Papers
The academic study of food has undoubtedly been one of the growth areas of the last twenty-five years. However, Postcolonial studies has been relatively slow to embrace the study of culinary cultures and food histories in a postcolonial context.[i] The contemporary popularity of Food Studies, both as an area of academic enquiry and in terms of a growing audience of more general readers, is evident from the burgeoning number of publications which cross these audiences, such as those which examine single foods in their various historical, cultural and global contexts[ii] and the growing appetite for cookery programmes and writing.
This symposium invites papers on food and the postcolonial, across and between different disciplines, in order to make a significant contribution to this emerging strand of postcolonial food studies. Papers may, for example, consider food preparation, cooking and/or consumption in literary, filmic, sacred or visual texts, travel writing, advertising, life writing and oral histories, menus, cookbooks and cookery programmes, foodways and food histories, postcolonial ecologies and environmentalism, may focus on intergenerational differences, food memories and nostalgia or gustatory experiences and the politics of taste.
The reach of papers may be territory-specific or global and we especially welcome submissions which consider the global dimensions of food and foodways. For example, how might we map a consideration of food onto the global connectedness and globalizing processes of colonialism and decolonization? What happens when food ‘travels’, and how do transnational and/or diasporic writers negotiate their identities through and with food? How do contemporary writers and/or artists navigate tensions between the local and the global, foodways of the past and of the present and how are concepts of culinary ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’ articulated in their works? How do postcolonial writers on food come to writing and what is their relationship with the audiences which ‘consume’ their works?
Possible focuses for papers include:
Food and narrative
Food and identity (cultural, ethnic, caste, class and gender)
Feeding, feasting and fasting as key tropes
Food rituals and practices
Food and oral traditions
Food and social order
Food and diaspora
Food and globalization
Historical foodways
Food and colonial nostalgia
Food and the postcolonial exotic
Culinary ‘tradition’ and/or ‘authenticity’
Food and globalization
Hospitality and commensality
Food theories / food and theory
Papers will be 20 minutes long. Please submit proposals of no more than 500 words to Dr Sarah Lawson Welsh s.lawsonwelsh@yorksj.ac.uk no later than 31st March 2017. Acceptance of papers will be confirmed by 7th April 2017. Successful papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of the international, peer-reviewed Journal of Postcolonial Writing on food and the postcolonial, to be edited by Sarah Lawson Welsh.
The free day symposium will include a keynote by Nick Ahad, award winning journalist, broadcaster and playwright, whose most recent play, The Chef Show, is set in a northern curry house. There will also be a Cook-up/demonstration by Keralan cook and educator, Sharmini Thomas.
Tickets are limited and can be booked via Eventbrite