Gandhi, Ashima (2024) The politics of belonging through food : place, space, and nostalgia in contemporary South Asian women's lives in London. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.
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Abstract
This thesis is an exploration of belonging through people, place, and food. Politics is sentimental. However, its emotional characteristics are often unacknowledged. In academic discourse, belonging is politicised when it is threatened. In this thesis, I explore how belonging is politicised for women of the South Asian diaspora and how and why the desire for belonging persists through their personal narratives. The participants do not represent a homogeneous experience of belonging, yet it is from their unique perspectives that I examine their attachments to place, community, city, and nation. Through my qualitative findings, a sense of belonging was articulated through ambivalence, where participants negotiate between several tensions of identity, gender, and nationality. In this thesis, I argue food serves a proxy from which I explore the unique ways in which the participants negotiate between these tensions and find a sense of belonging in moments and in spaces – in kitchens, restaurants, and community meetings. I argue ambivalence towards these places makes space for inevitable changes that occur. Through these changes, participants developed detachment to nations or, as much as possible, the unequal frameworks of the state, and instead, nurtured attachments to cities, neighbourhoods, communities, and solidarity networks. However, these positions are never fixed. Ambivalence allows for a recalculation and rearticulation of what belonging means, how it changes, and how it can be practiced.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Copyright Holders: | The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, who asserts his/her right to be known as such according to the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. No dealing with the thesis contrary to the copyright or moral rights of the author is permitted. |
| Depositing User: | Acquisitions And Metadata |
| Date Deposited: | 15 Apr 2024 15:51 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Apr 2024 08:39 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/53389 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.18743/PUB.00053389 |
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