Language, Memory, and Affect in Diasporic Food Discourse: Austin Clarke’s Barbadian Culinary Memoir
In his 1999 culinary memoir Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit, the Barbadian Canadian writer Austin Clarke articulates a relational sense of cultural belonging—a sort of “taste of home” transposed to the diaspora—through the narrativization of the Barbadian food of his origins from a diasporic threshold. By triangulating food, memory, and affect, this essay aims to delineate Clarke’s use of a highly affective narrative language, which reflects a visceral approach to food narratives by drawing on the sensory, synesthetic, and affective aspects of memories connected with food and the practice of cooking. It demonstrates how Clarke’s narrative language, which is peppered by the skillful use of Bajan lexical and syntactical elements that structure most of the account, draws on the experiential knowledge of the black diasporic tradition to enable the accentuation and reformulation of a fundamentally diasporic sense of Canadian cultural belonging.
Copyright (c) 2022 Emilio Amideo
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Copyright (c) 2022 Emilio Amideo
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
