SESSION 1.1: Eating Our Feelings: Cultural Loss and Reclamation in the Context of Cultural Domicide

In this paper, we offer a multi-generational auto-ethnography of food. As mother and daughter, we explore and theorize our experiences of cultural loss that resulted from the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II. Two theoretical concepts, domicide and memoricide frame our paper. Domicide, or the destruction of physical spaces of the home, results in memoricide or the loss of cultural memory (Eileen, 2001, 3). To this framework, we add the concept of cultural domicide. Here, we argue that domicide resulted in both spatial and affective consequences due to loss of culture. For our family, relocation meant not only the (re)making of physical homes, but also the cultural un/making and cultural re-imagining of home. The affective component of home-making has had effects on how we have experienced our own cultural identities. Culture infuses the creation of both physical and affective spaces of home, while the home itself (how it is created and experienced) re/produces culture. In this paper we take three parallel trajectories in order to mine the intersections of culture and space (physical and affective) through an exploration of our relationships with food. The first trajectory is to examine the multi-generational impact of the loss of physical spaces (home) due to the internment. The second trajectory is the examination of resulting cultural memoricide, especially as it relates to cultural home-making and food. The third trajectory examines our cultural (and culinary) losses and our own journeys toward cultural reclamation through food