Culinary Placemaking: Cookbooks as Artifacts of Displaced Muslim Women's Lives

Abstract: This article considers cookbooks written by two displaced Shia Ismaili Muslim women—Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's The Settler's Cookbook and four editions of Noorbanu Nimji's A Spicy Touch —to discover how food becomes a means of placemaking in the diaspora. The authors fled East Africa in the 1970s when Idi Amin expelled Asians from Uganda and anti-Asian sentiment reverberated in other East African countries as well. They made their way to Europe and North America. Cookbooks were often the earliest texts penned by Ismaili women in the diaspora, yet they remain an understudied archive. This article considers such cookbooks as they give a rare account of this minority Muslim community's settlement in the West. Through the cookbooks we uncover women's contribution to the biological and cultural reproduction of this religious community and discover that placemaking has a culinary dimension. Indeed, studies of refugee placemaking often focus on the built environment; this article extends the definition of place-making to include sensory experiences through which displaced people remember and craft new attachments. Cooking and eating are some such experiences. An examination of Muslim women's culinary placemaking thus enhances our understanding of refugee life and its intersection with religion.