oa Nostalgia and Food as Memory and Translation Object in Fadia Faqir, Leila Aboulela and Layla AlAmmar

Migrants’ geographic and temporal movements and border-crossings often involve the creative use of nostalgic attachments, embodied memories and everyday material objects as means of continuity and translation between past and present, the old home and the new home. This paper examines the transnational construction and negotiation of diasporic subjectivity from the perspective of nostalgic embodied memory and memory objects. Three novels by Anglophone Arab women writers Fadia Faqir, Leila Aboulela, and Layla AlAmmar will be considered as examples. The novels depict the migration experience of Arab Muslim women in Britain and represent the entanglements of cultural encounter, social trauma, domestic violence and gender through memory objects and experiences of food in diaspora. In this context, embodied and performative remembering through rituals, traditions, social customs, nostalgic experiences triggered by the senses and involving homely foods, and other emotionally relevant objects of everyday life and material culture function as vehicles to reconnect with lost realities and create bridges between cultural landscapes. Drawing on a cultural-materialist approach and emphasizing the positive value of nostalgia in the daily tasks of migrant homebuilding, I discuss nostalgia and memory objects as a narrative strategy and means of translation that resists geographic and cultural dislocation in affective ecologies of home and enables meaningful cultural exchanges, adaptations and transactions. This, I argue, is complicated by minority discourse and postcolonial identity and gender politics in a migratory context where cultural exchanges can be disrupted by trauma and hegemony.