2025/12/5
Erfan Rajabi

Erfan Rajabi

Academic rank: Assistant Professor
ORCID:
Education: PhD.
H-Index:
Faculty: Faculty of Language and Literature
ScholarId:
E-mail: e.rajabi [at] uok.ac.ir
ScopusId: View
Phone: 1205
ResearchGate:

Research

Title
Foodways and culinary identity in Iranian-American memoirs
Type
JournalPaper
Keywords
Foodways; Living with; Iranian-American memoirs; culinary identity; positioning; discourse analysis
Year
2025
Journal Food, Culture & Society An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research
DOI
Researchers Erfan Rajabi

Abstract

The current study aims at exploring the issue of foodways in three Iranian-American memoirs, namely, Gelareh Asayesh’s Saffron Sky, Firoozeh Dumas’ Funny in Farsi, and Davar Ardalan’s My Name is Iran (Ardalan). With this in mind, it adopts subject positioning theory and discourse analysis to examine the connectivity between food and religion, culture, economy, individual and collective gastronomic memories, urban and rural food habits, and ethnicity and, specifically, how the Iranian-Americans position themselves and others through food-related practices. The results indicate that food practices and multiple subject positions are constructed and (re)-constructed in religious, ethnic, cultural, economic, gendered, local, national, and transnational contexts. Despite the dominant mainstream and dominated ethnic culinary, Persian and American foodways can live with each other on the same sofreh. Accordingly, in these memoirs “home” is not a nostalgic space but a “feeling at home” in a double sense.