'“We are what we eat”, or so we are often told, but we are also how we eat and how we talk and write about food. This special focus on Food and the Postcolonial originated as a Symposium called “Culinary Cultures”, held in conjunction with the Northern Postcolonial Network at York St John University (UK) in May 2017. Starting from the premise that one of the most visible growth areas of interdisciplinary research in the last quarter century has been the popular and academic study of food, it sought to examine why postcolonial studies has been relatively slow to embrace the study of postcolonial culinary cultures and food histories and it sought to “bridge the gap” by inviting critical explorations of the intersections between the two discourses from a variety of perspectives. The resulting papers revealed a rich vein of thinking about food and the postcolonial and a provided a vibrant snapshot of young and established scholars working across and between different disciplines and making a significant contribution to the emerging strand of postcolonial food studies. Papers considered food preparation, cooking and/or consumption in selected literary, filmic, sacred and visual texts, including the complex history and meanings of barbecue as traditional and “authentic” food in the Deep South of America; travel writing and the tourist gaze in Bali; advertising and the politics of the Fair Trade movement in Palestine; life writing, gender and oral histories in African and Pakistani diasporic communities in Britain; constructions of nation in colonial as well as contemporary menus and cookbooks; Keralan and Indo-Caribbean foodways and food histories; the hotly contested issue of culinary “authenticity”; postcolonial ecologies and environmentalism; intergenerational differences, food memories and nostalgia; gustatory experiences and the politics of taste.' (Sarah Lawson Welsh : Introduction)
