Résumé
Whether one speaks of novels, short stories, life-writing or personal essays, food scenes in fiction writing are often particularly meaningful and sometimes become iconic. Within the frame of postcolonial and diasporic literature, one can think of such cooking scenes as G.’s mother preparing one last meal of flying fish and cuckoo for her son in George Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin (1953), or Romesh Gunesekera’s preparation of a Sri Lankan Christmas turkey by Triton in Reef (1994), or the family dinners shared with Mr Pirzada, as remembered by Lilia in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine” (Interpreter of Maladies, 2000), among others. Regarding essays, Ramabai Espinet’s “Indian cuisine” is another case in point. And if one tackles texts that oppose a different type of oppression, Dalit literature offers a wide array of scenes of cooking and eating that easily stand out in texts like Karukku by Bama (2000), Growing up Untouchable in India by Vasant Moon (2001), Joothan: A Dalit’s Life by Om Prakash Valmiki (2003), Outcaste: A Memoir by Narendra Jadhav (2003), The Weave of my Life by Urmila Pawar (2008), The Prisons we Broke by Baby Kamble (2008), among others.The texts mentioned above can be read using the angle of class, caste, social status, colonial domination, or domestic caste oppression. They shed light on the subaltern, the despised and the unaccounted for, the rejected ones who are rendered invisible and untouchable. As it brings together texts from different genres and continents, this paper proposes to examine specific scenes to understand how food scenes crafted through specific narrative modalities (digression, analepsis, etc.) can be repurposed to reclaim agency and become sites of resistance and empowerment. More than subalternity the question of empowerment and agency through the narrative of food will be at stake.