Eating Elsewhere: Food and Migration in the Contemporary Mediterranean

Abstract

This project addresses the uses of food in contemporary Mediterranean literature and film, and the positioning of the culinary as an index of assimilation in the stories of Mediterranean migrants, refugees, and other dislocated persons. “Eating Elsewhere: Food and Migration in the Contemporary Mediterranean” builds on work from the field of food studies to develop a framework for writing about food from a literary, rather than anthropological or sociological perspective. Scholars of food studies have largely neglected literature, and literary analyses have rarely addressed food writing as more than an indicator of historical reality. This research brings together readings of contemporary cookbooks, novels, memoirs, and films in Italian, Arabic, French, and English to posit that the Mediterranean is a zone of proximate otherness, where polities maintain distinct local cultures even while honoring their common history as nodes in Mediterranean trade routes and empires. Food – the famous Mediterranean diet – is what Mediterranean societies profess to continue to share, but it is also a site where each culture stakes its claim to a unique heritage. I argue that within the space of the Mediterranean, food from these distinct yet connected regions stands as an object of irreducible otherness, alternately yearned after and abhorred. Despite claims that from within the field of Mediterranean studies that the Mediterranean as a salient, meaningful regional perspective loses its interpretive power by the late modern period, I argue for the persistent relevance of a Mediterranean framework for understanding movement around the sea since World War II. Although its present configuration lacks cultural and political unity, this work on food in migration narratives shows that the Mediterranean continues to serve as one of the world’s crossroads, where the other is the neighbor, almost indistinguishable from the self. If the legal and physical hardships of migration reinforce the splits between North and South, and West and East, a Mediterranean perspective blurs these divisions, presenting an alternative to Eurocentric and area studies frameworks. In the modern and contemporary eras, the Mediterranean offers a way of disrupting the received geographies of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East in order to institute new possibilities for comparison. Building a theory of the contemporary Mediterranean encourages multi-directional readings which open new avenues for thinking through the possibilities and ramifications of intercultural contact in the current age. Following an introduction to the methodological, historical, and theoretical stakes of Mediterranean studies and food studies, three chapters of this dissertation consider Mediterranean food culture through the lenses of memory and nostalgia in Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968) and Kamāl Raḥīm’s Days of the Diaspora (2008), identification in Amara Lakhous’ Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2006) and Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love (2009), and hunger in Raffaele Nigro’s Mediterranean Diary, Ḥanān al Shaykh’s Beirut Post (1992, English translation published as Beirut Blues) and Muḥammad Shukrī’s For Bread Alone (1973) The final body chapter marshals all of these concepts for a case study of Sephardi food in the Levant as depicted in Edgar Morin’s Vidal and His Family (1989), and André Aciman’s Out of Egypt (1994).