Food Culture, Migration, and Memory in the Works of V. S. Naipaul

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_4How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Hybridity; food culture; migration; memory; diaspora; postcolonial studies

Abstract

V. S. Naipaul’s works profoundly engage with the varied themes such as the enigma of displacement, perturbed quest for belonging, and considered cultural memories. Though, these themes are globally debatable like the motifs of history, politics, and geography. Naipaul oeuvres also mediate the ordinary but evolutionary ideology of food, in his narratives. Through this paper, I tend to examine the interrelationship between food, migration, and memory in Naipaul’s works, proposing that culinary practices and sensory occurrences function as potent testimonies of diasporic state of being. Food too becomes a locale where personal histories of progress, dislocation, and loss are retained and interpreted, enabling the migrants to reflect upon, revise, and negotiate their identities within unfamiliar cultural spaces. More than treating food as a source of comfort or nostalgia, Naipaul presents it as a complex cultural turner marked by the colonial histories, social hierarchies, and material conditions. By interpretation of food as a narrative and not a domestic detail, this study reveals how everyday acts of eating and remembering illuminate the fragile processes through which diasporic identities are formed, disrupted, and reconfigured. To supplement and complement my exploration I have taken into consideration Naipaul’s select texts, A House for Mr Biswas, The Enigma of Arrival, An Area of Darkness, and India: A Wounded Civilization grounding well fully upon the ideology of postcolonial theory, cultural studies, memory studies, and food studies. Ultimately, the food remains a critically trans-cultural entity as well as a substantive element through which Naipaul’s exploration of migrant subjectivity and the textures of everyday life can be more deeply understood and constructed.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Nandini Sharma
AU  - Priyanka Yadav
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/30
TI  - Food Culture, Migration, and Memory in the Works of V. S. Naipaul
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Food Studies: Intersections of Culture, Science and Sustainability (ICEFS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 27
EP  - 34
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_4
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_4
ID  - Sharma2026
ER  -