Queering Striated Food Politics: Tropical Postg(l)ocal Precarity in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.23.2.2024.4027

Keywords:

Queering, Straited Food Politics, Post(g)local Precarity, Smooth Politics, War Machine, Tropicality, Tropical Post(g)local Precarity, Romesh Gunesekera

Abstract

The inoperativity of striated narratives of food politics stands caught up by patriarchal practices of identity formation entailing codification of different sexualities in terms of ‘rigid’ territories and strata and therefore cannot but conform to the irresistible snares of tropical postg(l)ocal precarity embodied by the disseminating strands of neoliberal capitalism. It thus calls for the actualization of queering to decimate ‘rigid segmentarities’ of striated food politics, which seeks to work in tandem with the territorializing movements of tropical postg(l)ocal precarity backed by the structures of patriarchal normativity. Queering striated food politics in the context of Sri Lanka strikes up an epistemic departure from the practices of culinary stratification of sexualities and eventually takes up rhizomatic movements both to call the nuanced liaisons between striated food politics and tropical postg(l)ocal precarity into question and suggest a ‘smooth politics’ in the form of a nomadic ‘war machine’. Queering striated food politics thus entails a strong resistance against the patriarchal culinary incarcerations of sexualities, taking substantial recourse to Romesh Gunesekera’s novel Reef. 

Author Biography

Abhisek Ghosal, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India

Abhisek Ghosal PhD currently works at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, Jharkhand, India. His areas of research interest include Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Blue Humanities, South Asian Literature, Critical Theory and Indic Studies, among others. He has previously published in eTropic and has written for the New Global Studies and symploke. He has published a monograph Plasti(e)cological Thinking: Working out an (Infra)structural Geoerotics. He has recently contributed an article to the edited volume titled The Monarch and Nonhuman in Literature and Cinema: Western and Global Perspectives published by Routledge in 2024. His latest monograph on Blue Humanities was published by Routledge in 2024.  

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Published

2024-10-15

How to Cite

Ghosal, A. (2024). Queering Striated Food Politics: Tropical Postg(l)ocal Precarity in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 23(2), 286–303. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.23.2.2024.4027