Food for anti-settler colonial thought: Christiane Dabdoub Nasser, ‘Food and the Transmission of Culture: Linking Past, Present, and Future’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Food for anti-settler colonial thought: Christiane Dabdoub Nasser, ‘Food and the Transmission of Culture: Linking Past, Present, and Future’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 2024

17Dec24

Excerpt: The transmission of food culture is a long, slow, organic process, an immersive experiential learning communicated across generations and across frontiers, with ruptures due to emigration, war, and displacement. The contributions to this second special edition of the Jerusalem Quarterly devoted to Palestinian food and foodways draw attention to the role of women, men, and children in securing this transmission, and the deliberate interference in this transmission to serve political agendas. From traditional wedding celebrations in early twentieth-century Palestine to contemporary cookery books and vlogs, transmission is examined through the lenses of Palestinian and diasporic identities, settler colonialism, commodification, resistance, survival, and “gastro-diplomacy.” Lifestyles become an embodiment of food practices interwoven with relationships and identities, with the Gaza Food Kitchen as a poignant example of community mobilization and documenting “the heartbreaking [current] realities on the ground.” Social media posts and reels show the preparation of traditional dishes while bombs are being dropped on Gaza, familiar existential images as the war enters its second year, confirming how sheer survival is a form of resistance. Settler colonialism is scrutinized as an agent of rupture that unsettles age-old practices, denies Indigeneity, tampers with memory, and alters history in the service of a triumphant Zionism keen on constructing a narrative to suppport its colonizing claims to Palestine.

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