Coolitude Culinary Memory as Cultural Expression Among Indentures a Gastrocolonial Approach in Khal Torabully's Selected Poems
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The present research study focuses on how food can be interpreted as a sort of indentured resistance in Khal Torabully's selected poems. The idea of Gastrocolonial is used as analysis of the various manifestations of food memories, spices, and markets as symbols of cultural continuity for Indian indentured laborers. The poems suggest the historical interrelationship between slavery, indenture and colonial trading networks. It highlights the subjective lives of migrants that transcended the Kala Pani. It provides a way of archiving identities that are facing displacement and cultural erasure. Tamarind, saffron, cumin, coriander, salt, roots and stoves become strong emblems in negotiating loss, exile and belonging by the indentured subject. The study finds a gaze at sites of gastrocolonialism in such poems reveals the redirection of the agency of agricultural goods. Also shows how eating acts as a form of resistance to colonization, to the exploitation of human labor. In conclusion, Torabully re-imagines the erased past of indentured communities and by re-invoking food in relation to these histories reveals and celebrates the diasporic, inter-cultural, memory and taste of resistance. Keywords: cultural erasure, displacement, exile, gastrocolonialism, indentured laborers.
DOI: 10.54878/42znk996
Author: Javeria Kiran Kiran
Institution: Lahore College for Women University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7224958587