期刊名称：PostScriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies
电子版ISSN：2456-7507
出版年度：2020
卷号：5
期号：2
页码：268-274
DOI：10.5281/zenodo.3972296
语种：English
出版社：Sarat Centenary College
摘要：The cuisine and culinary practices of every geographically demarcated region has a major contribution towards its cultural history, heritage and inheritance. They become a mark of identity for the creation of a homogeneous community as well as the signifiers of identification to the rest of the world. These area specific cuisines, culinary preferences and their ways of preparation have a ritualistic significance with their own distinct spaces in the cultural registers of any community. They constitute a rich heritage in themselves as prominent identity markers through which the past is re-lived in the present, preserving them for the future. Diasporic literature all over the world deal with the anguish, identity crises and complexities faced by the migrant communities as they straddle between the diverse ways of two unlike and unfamiliar worlds striving to maintain their own cultural distinctiveness and at the same time challenging the fears of being rejected by both their motherlands of the past as well as the lands of the present. These struggles and conflicts often create a volatile zone of conflict between the migrants and the hosts, occasionally leading to cultural feuds. The present paper makes an attempt to read Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story Mrs Sen’s as a document of this conflict and diasporic existential crisis and show how the protagonist holds on to the cuisine and gastronomic preferences of her homeland with ritualistic significance as the means of asserting her own identity and proclaiming the cultural supremacy of her own nation’s culinary heritage. It also focuses on the role memory plays in this constant negotiation of affirmation of one’s identity along with providing sustenance to her anguished self as she negotiates the cultural displacement and shifting cultural registers.
