ABSTRACT
Migration stories about immigrant families and displaced ethnic communities rely on well-documented connections between food and memory to underline migrants’ links to their former homes: food is used to demonstrate the ties that persist between migrants and their pasts even as they undergo processes of assimilation and acculturation abroad. Less attention has been paid to the use of food precisely not to remember, but to forget. Focusing on Luca Guadagnino’s dreamy 2009 film about a Russian who has married into an Italian family, Io sono l’amore (I Am Love), and Amara Lakhous’ 2006 novel of immigrants in Rome, Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio (Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio), in this chapter I examine Italian stories of migrants who are dissociated from, not clinging to, their pasts. The protagonists in these narratives instrumentalize Italian cuisine in a zero-sum game of selfhood, attempting to erase their pasts as they create new selves in the present. From their negotiations with home and homeland we can extrapolate patterns of identification that suggest a narrative arc held in common among those who eat to become other: escape, uncertainty and isolation, and the final subsuming of the past beneath the present. This process of identification lays bare the fault lines at the migrant’s core. After beginning with a discussion of the problem of ‘identity’ in literary studies, I argue that Guadagnino’s film and Lakhous’ novel are counter-narratives to assimilation tropes involving a negotiation between past and present, or heritage and new homeland. Instead, these are stories of migration as an elective and solitary phenomenon which results in a complete break between past and present. In the process, ‘homeland’ and ‘identity’ are refigured as functions of choice rather than birth.
