The Culinary Self : Diasporic Belonging in Ethnic American Literature

This article examines the use of culinary culture as a literary device to explore diasporic belonging in two ethnic American memoirs: Peter Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate and Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava. Through close analysis, the study argues that food serves as more than cultural nostalgia—it functions as a symbolic and performative tool for negotiating identity, memory, and emotional geography. Balakian’s narrative frames food as a means of accessing traumatic family history and symbolic ethnicity, while Abu-Jaber presents food with humor and fluidity, reflecting her shifting position within a hyphenated Jordanian-American identity. The paper highlights how ethnic roles, intergenerational memory, and cultural hybridity emerge through culinary representations. Drawing on theories of symbolic ethnicity (Gans), and the Third Space (Bhabha), the study concludes that food in ethnic memoirs reflects a “marinated” conception of motherland—one not fixed in geography but formed through emotional and cultural entanglement.