Kitchens in Conflict: Eating the Enemy
R
- Date/Time
- 11/13/2013 7:00 PM EST - 8:30 PM EST
- Fee
- Free
- Description
- The Postcolonial Research Group at ODU and the Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity are pleased to present Dr. Anita Mannur’s presentation titled “Kitchens in Conflict: Eating the Enemy,” which will take place on November 13 from 7 and 8:30 pm. Her visit will be virtual, so attendees will have the opportunity to participate at distance locations. Details will follow shortly and will be posted prominently. The abstract for her talk is below. The PRG and ISRE hope to see you there. Mannur's talk emerges from new work in progress in which she examines how the figure of the “enemy” in contrast to the notion of “comfort food” is constructed by examining social media, cookbooks and food trucks that are devoted to the dissemination of culinary knowledge. Her research takes her into the exploration of the realm of which cuisines are considered “unpalatable” within a culture of militaristic imperialism and the cultural spaces and narratives in which the figure of the “enemy combatant” is reimagined. Some of the sites she examines are a Chicago based performance art installation called “Enemy Kitchen,” the Gaza cookbook and Conflict Kitchen, a take-out restaurant in Pittsburgh, PA. Conflict Kitchen reformats the preexisting social relations of food and economic exchange to engage the general public in discussions about cultures, and people that they might know little about outside of the polarizing rhetoric of U.S. politics and the narrow lens of media headlines by showcasing cuisines only of the nations with which the US is directly engaged in war. This work suggests that the culinary, an emerging theoretical space within the purview of transnational American studies, offers important ways to think about empire, territory and gender.
