•  
  •  
 

Abstract

Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Sugarbread (2016) illustrates how race and class are negotiated through culinary practices in a lower-middle-class Sikh family living in Singapore. Through acts of shopping for groceries, cooking local Singaporean cuisine, and rejecting the communal temple food associated with shame and social discrimination, the novel highlights the family’s aspirations of social mobility shaped by the character Jini’s childhood experiences of food and economic scarcity. While the characters in the novel have access to food, their culinary practices are marked by memories of charity and discomfort as a South Asian diasporic family negotiating racialized hierarchies and gendered vulnerability in Singapore. Through a non-linear narrative, the novel foregrounds their limited access to social, economic, and cultural capital in Singapore. While the text has received limited scholarly attention, similar studies on South Asian diasporic women often analyze texts by employing traditional critical methods to explore the complexities of identity. However, in such scholarship, intergenerational differences between family members, the role of diasporic communities in navigating unjust social systems, and the affective qualities of texts are left unexplored. Situated within literary food studies and feminist affect theory, this qualitative study bridges this gap by employing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading in conversation with Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection to analyze the nuanced behaviours of two women characters through their interactions with food in both public and private spaces. Through its dual role as a necessity and a marker of aspiration and social mobility, food becomes a site of resistance, identity formation, and acclimatization for the characters in the novel. This study expands the discourse on women and migration by exploring the psychological effects of gendered, racial, and economic marginalization through its representation in contemporary literature.

Download

Share

COinS