2026/03/12 by Penglu Shi, Hui Pan · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Short Stories in Global Literature #American and British Literature Analysis #American Sports and Literature
paper · doi:10.1080/0013838x.2026.2635938
openalex publication_date 2026/03/12 · openalex created_date 2026/03/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
This paper examines Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” through the lens of food as a narrative and cultural agent. Moving beyond readings that reduce food to ethnic markers, it argues that Lahiri deploys food in three interrelated registers: as narrative food, where culinary images orchestrate layers of deception and unreliable focalisation; as productive food, where Shoba’s culinary practices reclaim agency, resist patriarchal scripts, and archive diasporic memory; and as cosmopolitan food, where hybrid culinary habits register the pressures of migration, loss, and minority cosmopolitanism. In these roles, food functions not merely as sustenance but as “storied matter” that mediates gender, subjectivity, and diasporic belonging. Through these layered inscriptions of food, Lahiri ultimately reimagines the possibilities of cosmopolitanism, one grounded in unhomeliness, minoritarian experience, and the affective labour of everyday life.