The Politics of Responsive Cookbooks: Counter Gastronomy Collectibles in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate
This essay examines the politics of counter cookbooks whose role shifts from receptacles to responses that mobilize revolutionary culinary spaces in the war narrative of Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate (1989). In particular, the essay redirects the main theories and critiques that have bee...
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Casa Cărții de Știință
2024-12-01
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| Series: | Cultural Intertexts |
| Online Access: | https://b00e8ea91c.clvaw-cdnwnd.com/4fb470e8cbb34a32a0dc1701f8d7322d/200000490-89d7a89d7c/23-34%20ATIEH.pdf |
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| author | Majda R. ATIEH Batoul DEEB |
| author_facet | Majda R. ATIEH Batoul DEEB |
| author_sort | Majda R. ATIEH |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | This essay examines the politics of counter cookbooks whose role shifts from receptacles to responses that mobilize revolutionary culinary spaces in the war narrative of Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate (1989). In particular, the essay redirects the main theories and critiques that have been established and espoused in culinary studies. In this reading of Like Water for Chocolate, a cross-cultural intervention in the existing scholarship on domestic spatiality and female identity is addressed. Esquivel’s narrative features provisioning collectibles that encode the mobility of the kitchen as a repository of women’s counter-discourses that not only reverse but also chaotically recreate the structured conceptions in the master war narratives. The kitchen in Esquivel’s narrative compiles cryptic scrapbooks of recipes whose technologies of knowledge are either decoded or re-inscribed from one generation to another. Arguably, women’s transgenerational gastronomic writings function as intersemiotic artefacts that activate performative subject positions in gendered households and varied social contexts that reflect the dominant power dynamics. So, Like Water for Chocolate decentralizes the impact of external wars, as it curates recipes that are ekphrazeined and recreated in foodways that empower individuals, galvanize new alliances, and decolonize female relations from the national/international ideologies of warscapes, cultural signifiers, and collective memory. The essay incorporates Homi Bhabha’s theory on the relation between the codification of history and the art of collecting to examine the discursive relations between food and power. Ultimately, this study revisits the complex dynamics of foodways as narrative functions, especially in relation to social inequalities and justice as portrayed through literature and cultural narratives. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-7c7c5df2428342fe985ad19dbad6e879 |
| institution | OA Journals |
| issn | 2393-0624 2393-1078 |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2024-12-01 |
| publisher | Casa Cărții de Știință |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Cultural Intertexts |
| spelling | doaj-art-7c7c5df2428342fe985ad19dbad6e8792025-08-20T02:36:11ZengCasa Cărții de ȘtiințăCultural Intertexts2393-06242393-10782024-12-01142334https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14287800The Politics of Responsive Cookbooks: Counter Gastronomy Collectibles in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for ChocolateMajda R. ATIEH0Batoul DEEBSultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Sultanate of OmanThis essay examines the politics of counter cookbooks whose role shifts from receptacles to responses that mobilize revolutionary culinary spaces in the war narrative of Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate (1989). In particular, the essay redirects the main theories and critiques that have been established and espoused in culinary studies. In this reading of Like Water for Chocolate, a cross-cultural intervention in the existing scholarship on domestic spatiality and female identity is addressed. Esquivel’s narrative features provisioning collectibles that encode the mobility of the kitchen as a repository of women’s counter-discourses that not only reverse but also chaotically recreate the structured conceptions in the master war narratives. The kitchen in Esquivel’s narrative compiles cryptic scrapbooks of recipes whose technologies of knowledge are either decoded or re-inscribed from one generation to another. Arguably, women’s transgenerational gastronomic writings function as intersemiotic artefacts that activate performative subject positions in gendered households and varied social contexts that reflect the dominant power dynamics. So, Like Water for Chocolate decentralizes the impact of external wars, as it curates recipes that are ekphrazeined and recreated in foodways that empower individuals, galvanize new alliances, and decolonize female relations from the national/international ideologies of warscapes, cultural signifiers, and collective memory. The essay incorporates Homi Bhabha’s theory on the relation between the codification of history and the art of collecting to examine the discursive relations between food and power. Ultimately, this study revisits the complex dynamics of foodways as narrative functions, especially in relation to social inequalities and justice as portrayed through literature and cultural narratives. https://b00e8ea91c.clvaw-cdnwnd.com/4fb470e8cbb34a32a0dc1701f8d7322d/200000490-89d7a89d7c/23-34%20ATIEH.pdf |
| spellingShingle | Majda R. ATIEH Batoul DEEB The Politics of Responsive Cookbooks: Counter Gastronomy Collectibles in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate Cultural Intertexts |
| title | The Politics of Responsive Cookbooks: Counter Gastronomy Collectibles in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate |
| title_full | The Politics of Responsive Cookbooks: Counter Gastronomy Collectibles in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate |
| title_fullStr | The Politics of Responsive Cookbooks: Counter Gastronomy Collectibles in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate |
| title_full_unstemmed | The Politics of Responsive Cookbooks: Counter Gastronomy Collectibles in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate |
| title_short | The Politics of Responsive Cookbooks: Counter Gastronomy Collectibles in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate |
| title_sort | politics of responsive cookbooks counter gastronomy collectibles in laura esquivel s like water for chocolate |
| url | https://b00e8ea91c.clvaw-cdnwnd.com/4fb470e8cbb34a32a0dc1701f8d7322d/200000490-89d7a89d7c/23-34%20ATIEH.pdf |
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