Foodscape and Ideological Space: A Postcolonial Critique of Cultural Contestations in the Pakistani Anglophone Literature

Abstract

Foodscapes in Pakistani Anglophone literature are ideological spaces where postcolonial cultural contestations are enacted, negotiated, and resisted, and these contestations are complicated by cultural hybridity in diasporic contexts and the complexities of modern Pakistani society. This study presents a postcolonial critique of cultural contestations in Pakistani Anglophone literature by examining foodscapes as ideological spaces. The study argues that food in Pakistani Anglophone literature is a politicized medium to negotiate colonial histories, class stratification, gender, religious belonging and diasporic conditions. It examines the contestation and reconfiguration of power relations between the global and the local, tradition and modernity, assimilation and resistance through culinary practices. In this study My Son the Fanatic (1999) by Hanif Kureishi, Kitchens (1985) by Toufiq Raffat and Tariq Rehman’s The Doll (1990) have been studied. Theoretically the study is grounded on gastropoetics and postcolonialism, conceptually it takes insights from Homi K. Bhabha’s: The Location of Culture, Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and Carole Counihan’s The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power to analyze the selected texts. The study establishes that foodscapes in these texts  articulate resistance to colonial epistemologies while concurrently exposes the internal fractures within postcolonial Pakistani society by highlighting the colonial legacies, gendered labor, hybridity, class hierarchies and conflicted identities. The analysis reveals that food representations in Pakistani Anglophone literature are deeply implicated in processes of cultural hybridity and ambivalence and further reflects the unresolved negotiations as the characteristic of postcolonial and diasporic identities.

Keywords: Cultural Contestations, Ideological Spaces, Colonial Histories, Hybridity, Diaspora