Domestic Orientialism: Cooking Up the Middle East in Post-War America

Beyond headlines depicting oil sheikhs or terrorists, Americans of the post-WW2 twentieth century encountered the Arab world through restaurants and recipes. In her talk, Jennifer Dueck explores how culinary representations of the Middle East and North Africa emerged in the United States, and what those representations taught Americans to understand about a region that was frequently so polemicized in the mainstream news media. Drawn from the book she is currently writing about the globalization of Middle Eastern and North African cuisines, her talk illustrates the striking diversity of images used to represent this complex region for American culinary consumers. Including examples from exotic orientalist food fantasies, to Armenian and Jewish diaspora cooking, to the Mediterranean diet fad, to Arab immigrant communities, this talk demonstrates how culinary representations served a surprisingly wide range of political and cultural agendas.