Taste, Testimony, and Resistance: Food as Embodied Memory in Contemporary Palestinian Literature

Chirayu Gupta; Priyanka Singh

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i03.80668

Taste, Testimony, and Resistance: Food as Embodied Memory in Contemporary Palestinian Literature

Author(s)	Mr. Chirayu Gupta, Dr. Priyanka Singh
Country	India
Abstract	This paper analyses food as the principal medium for embodied historical memory and political resistance in contemporary Anglophone Palestinian literature written in or translated into English from 2000 to the present. Bridging memory studies, postcolonial theory, and food studies, the paper performs a sustained comparative analysis of culinary imagery in the work of three major Palestinian authors writing in or translated into English—Randa Jarrar, Susan Abulhawa, and Sahar Khalifeh—complementing the foundational work of Arabic-language writers such as Radwa Ashour, whose The Woman from Tantoura remains an indispensable archive of Nakba food memory, whose novels span the historical trajectory of the late Ottoman period, British Mandate, Nakba of 1948, 1967 occupation and diasporic afterlife. The paper contends that culinary processes depicted in these novels-cooking mansaf, preparing za’atar, chopping tabouleh, pouring olive oil-do not simply serve as indices of nostalgic belonging to a vanished Palestine, but rather as material historiography-a practice of transferring, contesting, and salvaging historical knowledge through embodiment and practice, when official archives, maps and memories have been violently confiscated or destroyed. The critical theoretical innovation is the notion of culinary counter-mapping, a literary approach that re-imagines spatial reality through food-place associations, transforming the page into a space of cartographic resistance against colonial mapping, spatial appropriation and the destruction of memory. A brief comparison with South Asian diasporic food narratives further reveals what is specific about the Palestinian condition-the intrinsic inseparability of affect and politics under ongoing, rather than terminated, dispossession. Palestinian food narrative, the paper concludes, is a corporeal history of witness that resides at the juncture of personal grief and political testimony.
Keywords	Palestinian literature, Nakba, embodied memory, food studies, postcolonial theory, culinary counter-mapping, Randa Jarrar, Susan Abulhawa, Sahar Khalifeh, settler colonialism, diaspora
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 3, May-June 2026
Published On	2026-06-05
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i03.80668

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Taste, Testimony, and Resistance: Food as Embodied Memory in Contemporary Palestinian Literature

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