Literary Meals in Canada étudie Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit d'Austin Clarke, Chorus of Mushrooms et The Kappa Child de Hiromi Goto, This Body de Tessa McWatt, ainsi que Diamond Grill de Fred Wah. Cette thèse entreprend d’établir la signification de la nourriture dans ces récits, ce qu'elle permet aux auteur(e)s d'exprimer par rapport à divers thématiques—les structures sociales, la culture, le langage, ou encore la subjectivité—et comment ils/elles établissent des connexions entre elles, et quelles conclusions ils/elles en tirent. En d'autres termes, cette thèse s'interroge sur les stratégies utilisées par ces auteur(e)s lorsqu'ils écrivent de la “nourritéra-ture.” Ma lecture de ces oeuvres est aussi ancrée au sein d'une conversation sur la nourriture au sens large: que ce soit dans les cercles académiques, dans les supermarchés, par l'intermédiaire des étiquettes, ou dans les médias. J'examine comment mon corpus littéraire répond, infirme, ou confirme les discours actuels sur la nourriture. Divisé en quatre chapitres—Production, Approvisionnement, Préparation, et Consommation—ce mémoire précise la signification du “literary supermarket” de Rachel Bowlby, en s'appuyant sur les travaux de Michael Pollan et Hiromi Goto; compare la haute cuisine d'Escoffier à la “hot-cuisine” d'Austin Clarke; recherche les connections entre l’acte de faire la cuisine et celui de l’écrire chez Luce Giard, Austin Clarke, et Fred Wah; confronte les préceptes d'Emily Post concernant les bonnes manières de la table à la cacophonie et aux bruits de mastication chez Hiromi Goto; et relie Tessa McWatt et Elspeth Probyn qui partagent, toutes deux, un intérêt et une approche à la sustentation des corps. Les textes qui composent ce corpus sont des “foodbooks” (“aliment-textes”). La nourriture, et les différentes activités qui y sont associées, y est transcrite. C’est pourquoi cette thèse accorde une grande importance aux particularités de ce moyen d'expression. / Literary Meals in Canada examines Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit, Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and The Kappa Child, Tessa McWatt’s This Body, and Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill. It asks, what does food mean to these stories, what does it allow the writers in question to say—about social structures, culture, language, and subjectivity—and how do they go about making these connections or drawing these conclusions? In other words, what are their food-writing strategies? I also read these texts as part of a larger conversation about food, a conversation taking place in academic circles as well as at the supermarket, on food labels, on television, and other media outlets. I look for moments in which my literary corpus responds to and challenges food-centred discourse. Comprised of four chapters—Production, Procurement, Preparation, and Consumption—this dissertation explicates Rachel Bowlby’s term, “literary supermarket,” through Michael Pollan and Hiromi Goto; it compares Escoffier’s haute cuisine with Austin Clarke’s “hot-cuisine”; it tracks the kinship between “doing-cooking” and writing cooking, as articulated by Luce Giard, Austin Clarke, and Fred Wah; it reads Emily Post’s advice on table manners against Hiromi Goto’s cacophony of gnashing and nibbling; and it pairs Tessa McWatt with Elspeth Probyn, both of whom share a similar approach to, and interest in, bodies that eat. The texts that make up this corpus are foodbooks. Food and the activities and processes associated with it are therefore mediated by language. For this reason the dissertation attends to the particularities and the potential effects of writing food.

Literary Meals in Canada étudie Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit d'Austin Clarke, Chorus of Mushrooms et The Kappa Child de Hiromi Goto, This Body de Tessa McWatt, ainsi que Diamond Grill de Fred Wah. Cette thèse entreprend d’établir la signification de la nourriture dans ces récits, ce qu'elle permet aux auteur(e)s d'exprimer par rapport à divers thématiques—les structures sociales, la culture, le langage, ou encore la subjectivité—et comment ils/elles établissent des connexions entre elles, et quelles conclusions ils/elles en tirent. En d'autres termes, cette thèse s'interroge sur les stratégies utilisées par ces auteur(e)s lorsqu'ils écrivent de la “nourritéra-ture.” Ma lecture de ces oeuvres est aussi ancrée au sein d'une conversation sur la nourriture au sens large: que ce soit dans les cercles académiques, dans les supermarchés, par l'intermédiaire des étiquettes, ou dans les médias. J'examine comment mon corpus littéraire répond, infirme, ou confirme les discours actuels sur la nourriture. Divisé en quatre chapitres—Production, Approvisionnement, Préparation, et Consommation—ce mémoire précise la signification du “literary supermarket” de Rachel Bowlby, en s'appuyant sur les travaux de Michael Pollan et Hiromi Goto; compare la haute cuisine d'Escoffier à la “hot-cuisine” d'Austin Clarke; recherche les connections entre l’acte de faire la cuisine et celui de l’écrire chez Luce Giard, Austin Clarke, et Fred Wah; confronte les préceptes d'Emily Post concernant les bonnes manières de la table à la cacophonie et aux bruits de mastication chez Hiromi Goto; et relie Tessa McWatt et Elspeth Probyn qui partagent, toutes deux, un intérêt et une approche à la sustentation des corps. Les textes qui composent ce corpus sont des “foodbooks” (“aliment-textes”). La nourriture, et les différentes activités qui y sont associées, y est transcrite. C’est pourquoi cette thèse accorde une grande importance aux particularités de ce moyen d'expression. / Literary Meals in Canada examines Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit, Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and The Kappa Child, Tessa McWatt’s This Body, and Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill. It asks, what does food mean to these stories, what does it allow the writers in question to say—about social structures, culture, language, and subjectivity—and how do they go about making these connections or drawing these conclusions? In other words, what are their food-writing strategies? I also read these texts as part of a larger conversation about food, a conversation taking place in academic circles as well as at the supermarket, on food labels, on television, and other media outlets. I look for moments in which my literary corpus responds to and challenges food-centred discourse. Comprised of four chapters—Production, Procurement, Preparation, and Consumption—this dissertation explicates Rachel Bowlby’s term, “literary supermarket,” through Michael Pollan and Hiromi Goto; it compares Escoffier’s haute cuisine with Austin Clarke’s “hot-cuisine”; it tracks the kinship between “doing-cooking” and writing cooking, as articulated by Luce Giard, Austin Clarke, and Fred Wah; it reads Emily Post’s advice on table manners against Hiromi Goto’s cacophony of gnashing and nibbling; and it pairs Tessa McWatt with Elspeth Probyn, both of whom share a similar approach to, and interest in, bodies that eat. The texts that make up this corpus are foodbooks. Food and the activities and processes associated with it are therefore mediated by language. For this reason the dissertation attends to the particularities and the potential effects of writing food.

This dissertation examines selected literary works by Anita Rau Badami, Denise Chong, Hiromi Goto, Larissa Lai, and Kerri Sakamoto, exploring how their stories respond both to the absence of representations of Asian Canadian women in literary discourses of the early twentieth century and to homogenizing assumptions in official histories. My formulation of (re)presentation in the title recognizes the multiplicity and constructedness of these denoted identities and experiences and the self-representations of these writers as a response to this elision and misrepresentation. The term repair borrows from philosopher Hilde Lindemann Nelson’s theorizing of “narrative repair,” which involves telling counterstories, but also is used in psychological contexts as a healing mechanism. An elaboration of both models, as applied in this study, is optimally useful in diasporic contexts as resistance to the elision and/or racist and gendered discursive constructions of Asian Canadian women and as restoration of damaged identities. The texts under study—Tamarind Mem, The Concubine’s Children, Chorus of Mushrooms, When Fox Is a Thousand, and The Electrical Field—were all published in the mid-1990s, after the initial forays into the writing of novels by Asian Canadian authors such as Joy Kogawa (1981) and SKY Lee (1990). My choice of these sister narratives recognizes the family as central to identity construction and intergenerational (mis)understanding and emphasizes the importance of this period’s second-generation explosion of writings by Japanese, Chinese, and Indo Canadian women that paved the way for the current plethora of writings by authors from these cultural groups that contribute significantly to Canadian representations of diasporic identity. This study explores the nuances and pluralisms of the representations of Asian Canadian women. The texts under consideration are cultural autobiographies and matrilineal or sexually transgressive narratives that reinvent the cultural memory of Canadian women of Asian ancestry; produce cultural fusions through the transcreation of oral traditions and simulations of the oral, transcoding of ancestral tongues, and discursive strategies of silence; and address connections between self and place in examinations of Canada, the adopted country, as (un)homely territory. Presenting unhyphenated diasporic female subjects who exceed socially scripted boundaries of gender, sexuality, race, and nationality, in terms of both Canada and the writers’ and protagonists’ ancestral Asian nations, these “acts of narrative insubordination” (Nelson 8) exemplify emancipatory politics and recuperative and revisionary projects. Interrogating questions of (re)presentation and repair from positions of liminality and across gendered, racial, linguistic, and geographical divides, this research contributes to current urgent discussions of identity, transculturation, multiculturalism, and globalization in literary and cultural studies.