Delores B. Phillips (Old Dominion University)
of a Cuban Kitchen and a Haitian community cookbook entitled Hope for Haiti by International Child Care,
Inc. to determine how these works differently map the nations they depict in the recipe collections. Using
Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection and Gayatri Spivak’s concepts of haq and subalternity, the paper
contrasts the manner in which these cookbooks outline Caribbean nation-spaces against the ways in
which novels depict conditions of diaspora and exile. The novels under consideration in this presentation
are Edwidge Danticat’s Brother I’m Dying and Reinaldo Arenas’ memoir entitled Before Night Falls, both of
which depict exile and flight in bitter tones, but with different desires for repatriation. Examining these
cookbooks and novels in relation to each other, this presenter will argue that gastrocartographies of the
nations represented in cookbooks map in brightly colored strokes the darker mechanics of exile and
expulsion, which novels reveal in their starkest terms.
