Tastes Like Home: Food and Memory in Dubai's Intergenerational Diaspora

The city of Dubai is home to intergenerational Palestinian and Indian diasporas. Through storytelling at urban food tours, supper clubs, and cooking workshops, diasporic residents use foods as protagonists in their narratives of home. While Palestinian food storytellers share memories of a lost homeland, their Indian counterparts celebrate the co-existence of South and West Asian flavors in their home city. They offer a counterpoint to Emirati nationalism by indexing layers of immigrant history that have shaped culture in the UAE. Culinary performances of immigrant history valorize multiple belonging as they reimagine territorial attachment through taste. 
 

Sonali Pahwa is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts & Dance at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt (Northwestern University Press, 2020) and articles on gender performance on social media platforms in Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.