We are What We Eat Food Memories and Cross-Cultural Signification in Jhumpa Lahiris Mrs. Sens and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies New Husband

Name of Author : Rituparna Mukherjee

Abstract: Food and language are the primary premises of cultural identity. They not only serve as an anchor to our cultural and national roots, but in an ever-increasing, globalized and multicultural world, food transcends from being a mere biological necessity and a sensorial experience to a phenomenon that is lived, imagined, shared and proliferated through repeated performance. This paper seeks to look at the exploration of diasporic food phenomenon in the contemporary short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In investigating the grammar of the food idiom in the two selected short stories, the paper focusses on the difficulties of lived experiences in a foreign land, along with the comparisons of food idiolect, the notions of xenophobia and othering in America, a country which antithetically supports both multiculturalism and cultural essentialism in its fabric.

Keywords : Food Memory, Nostalgia, Trans-Culturalism, Hegemony, Othering

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