Spicing South Africa: representations of food and culinary traditions in South African contemporary art and literature

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:Francoise Vergés comments in her essay Let's Cook! that 'one could write the history of apeople, of a country, of a continent by writing the history of its culinary habits (250 ).Vergés here refers to the extent to which food can be seen to document and record certainevents or subjectivities. Exploring a wide range of texts spanning the late 1800s up to thepost-apartheid present, this thesis focuses in particular on the ways in which 'spice ascommodity, ingredient or symbol is employed to articulate and/or embed creole and diasporicidentities within the South African national context.The first chapter maps the depiction of the 'Malay figure within cookery books, focussingon the extent to which it is caught up in the trappings of the picturesque. This visibility isoften mediated by the figure's proximity to food. These depictions are then placed inconversation with the conceptual artist Berni Searle's photographic and video installations.Searle visually interrogates the stagnant modes of representation that accrue around the figureof the 'Malay and moves toward understandings of how food and food narratives structurecultural identity as complex and mutable.Chapter two shifts focus from the Cape to the ways in which 'Indian Cuisine becamesignificant within the South African context. Here the Indian housewife plays a role inperpetuating a distinctive cultural identity. The three primary texts discussed in this chapterare the popular Indian Delights cookery book authored by the Women's Cultural Group,Shamim Sarif's The World Unseen and Imraan Coovadia's The Wedding. Indian Delights.All illustrate the extent to which the realm of the kitchen, traditionally a female domain,becomes a space from which alternative subjectivities can be made. The kitchen as a place forcultural retention is explored further and to differing degrees in both The Wedding and TheWorld Unseen.Ultimately, indentifying cultural heritage through food enables tracing alternative andintersecting cultural identities that elsewhere, are often left out for neat and new ethnic,cultural or national identities. The thesis will in particular explore the extent to which spicesused within creole and/or diasporic culinary practices encode complex affiliations andconnections. Tracing the intimacies and the disjunctures becomes productive within the postapartheidpresent where the vestiges of apartheid's taxonomical impetus alongside a newmulticultural model threaten to erase further the complexities and nuances of everyday life.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University