Food blogs and the digital reimagination of South Asian diasporic publics

Abstract

Using the vivid appeal of photographs and text, South Asian diasporic bloggers present the pleasures of traditional recipes of regional Indian food. While the bloggers offer individual reminiscences about home, homeland and the comfort of home-cooked meals, the blog serves as a cultural form that works within a circulatory matrix where new configurations of cosmopolitan sociality are being constituted. In the transnational intimacies of the virtual kitchen, the bloggers create a culinary archive that mines regional details and local origins only to go beyond and forge broader culinary publics. Building linkages within prescribed templates, the blogs signify a new moment in the globalization of Indian regional food and a digital turn in the formation of networks of sociality and a strategic distribution of diasporic publics.