From the destroyed kitchen and rice field by villagers as punishment for her aunt’s infidelity in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976), to the children’s hunger after their parents’ border-crossing in Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us (2012), and to the organic borscht packets sent to Ukrainian boys in trenches by volunteering women in Olia Hercules’ Strong Roots (2025), food memoirs demonstrate how eating and writing are both systems of communication (Carruth 2013). This panel invites participants to consider how food writing and self-writing interact and how food and memory constitute modes of storytelling for each other, in formats such as book-length memoirs, graphic memoirs, testimonies, autobiographies, autobiographical novels, essays, films, blogs, etc.

With respect to these genres' differences defined in Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” (1989), we do not limit their boundaries in discussing the dynamic of food and memory. In addition, we mean with the “self” not the unity of author-narrator-character, but broadly, a locus of cultural history deeply embedded in power relations, bodily experiences, as well as interactions with institutions, social structures, and other agents. It follows that self-writing needs not to be in the first person. Finally, instead of seeing self-writing as the “trashcan” of history (Eakin 1989), we approach it as the inhabited history—contra History—that consists of lives seeking intimacy, belonging, and plurality (Chakrabarty 2000, Zhu 2018). In similar spirit, food studies scholars have treated food/culinary memoir, used interchangeably with “memoir with recipes,” an interdisciplinary medium that broadens life writing in national, international, and transnational contexts (Herrera 2020).

Regarding food(ways), preparation, presentation, spatial arrangement, consumption, and documentation as ways of remembering, panelists are encouraged to engage one or more perspectives listed below:

• Food as a medium for negotiating selfhood and relationships with home and homeland
• Food as witness of transforming cultural and political landscapes and/or past-present relations
• Food/hunger as testimony to the state of crisis, emergency, revolution, and war
• Food as resisting voices of colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism, and erased histories
• Food as desire and memories of fear, anxiety, and horror as well as comfort, confidence, and love
• The role of food in narrating migration, exile, displacement, as well as affiliation and assimilation
• Food writing and domestic labor in racialized, class, and gendered terms
• The ways food writing structures narratives of self and the way narrative modes of self frame experiences of food

We welcome comparative approaches at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, food studies, memory studies, feminist theory, or political history. For questions, please contact [email protected].