The panel will begin in colonial France with a discussion of Rachilde’s La Jongleuse (1900) and her enigmatic and multicultural protagonist, Eliante. In this decadent novel, the author intermingles culinary products and practices from across the French empire with those of the metropole to create an undecipherable female character who is, at once, menacing and attractive, direct and evasive. To be sure, Rachilde evokes typical orientalist tropes of non-French/non-European food and women as exotic, seductive and dangerous, but applies them here to a white woman, thus scandalizing the young medical student, Léon. Adeline Soldin’s paper, “Female Consumption and Colonial France in Rachilde’s La Jongleuse,” will explore the ways in which Eliante’s inclusive, yet independent style of eating reflects her singular sexuality. Indeed, Léon’s efforts to consume her as a passive, yet delectable delight are thwarted by her own very healthy appetite.
The next paper studies the works of the prolific prizewinning author Maryse Condé whose lived experiences traverse the colonial, decolonial, and post-colonial periods. Condé explains in the preface to her autobiographical Mets et merveilles (2015) that, for her, the act of cooking isn’t one of conformism or obedience. To the contrary, Condé was expected not to follow in the footsteps of her grandmother who had served as a cook for a family of white Creoles, and whose experience is revived in Victoire, les saveurs et les mots (2006). Rather, the author was drawn to gastronomy in her native Guadeloupe with the same “désir de déplaire” that lured her to literature. It was the subversive, not the submissive, possibilities of the act that whetted her appetite for whipping things up in the kitchen. In “Culinary Culminations: Maryse Condé’s Taste for Cuisine and Culture in Mets et merveilles,” Alison Rice explores Condé’s 2015 publication as an act of resistance and metamorphosis. She argues that Mets et merveilles reveals how, in different contexts and throughout a storied career, cooking at once provided Condé with continuity and led to transformation, as the narrative voice provocatively asserts: “Cooking changed my character.”
We will continue to explore the intersection of cooking and writing as a recipe for change in Elizabeth M. Collins’ analysis of the works of bestselling Quebecois author of Vietnamese origin, Kim Thúy. Through a comparison of Thúy’s novel Mãn (2014) with her narrative cookbook Le Secret des Vietnamiennes (2017), she proposes to examine the ways in which Vietnamese culinary culture is conjugated in francophone spaces by migrant women, and how these relations permit them to negotiate their own senses of self. In her presentation, “Si tu es femme, tu cuisines”: Cooking, writing, and diasporic Vietnamese femininity in works by Kim Thúy,” Collins questions the extent to which writing a cookbook – with its emphasis on process and adaptation, collectivity and components parts – can become a means for diasporic Vietnamese women to re-write themselves as they cross boundaries and confront exclusionary structures. Collins argues that cooking in Thúy’s works emerges as an aesthetic process capable of depicting the long, entangled histories of cultural transformation experienced—and brought about—by diasporic Vietnamese women.
The final presentation will interrogate Derrida’s ethics of eating together as fundamental to the reconstitution of a postcolonial self. In “‘Encore dans la cuisine’: Food and Recentering the Self in La Petite Dernière,” Alina Shubina argues that, in Fatima Daas’s 2020 autofiction novel, catharsis exists not in the generic act of communal or familial eating, but in the particular opportunity for expression and autonomy provided by the mother’s kitchen. Here, she reads the kitchen as an alternate center within the Parisian banlieues, signaling initially a further marginalization of Fatima’s mother but, ultimately, a fluid space where the stability of relationships of care and belonging can be reaffirmed despite changing parameters of identity — ‘French,’ ‘Algerian,’ ‘Clichoise,’ ‘asthmatic,’ ‘muslim,’ ‘sinner.’ The mother’s kitchen, the ‘kingdom’ which all others are prohibited from entering proves to be a space where Fatima can finally see the possibility of telling her story while remaining her mother’s ‘benti,’ (daughter).
Presentations will be strictly limited to 13 minutes, leaving plenty of time for discussion and Q&A, which will be moderated by our presider, Adele Kudish.