Aruna D’Souza
Fall 2013 Lecture
“Ingesting Culture: Cooking, Colonialism, and the Construction of Indian-ness”
Featuring Dr. Aruna D’Souza, art historian
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Soli Sorabjee Lecture in South Asian Studies
Our Fall 2013 lecture was held in the Shapiro Admissions Center and widely attended by undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and South Asian scholars, Women’s and Gender studies scholars, and art historians from the Boston area. Dr. Aruna D’Souza gave the tenth lecture in the Soli Sorabjee lecture series in South Asian Studies. Placing art and food in the larger context of colonial politics, Dr. D’Souza lectured on her own experience with food as cultural production in India and the Canadian diaspora. She spoke of her own experiences as a South Asian woman living in the diaspora and visiting India. Through a visual culture presentation, Dr. D’Souza showed how food is a crucial component of cultural production.
About the Speaker
Dr. Aruna D’Souza is a writer, critic, and historian of modern and contemporary art with a particular interest in issues of feminism, post colonialism, and globalization, and a cultural critic who writes on food’s relation to memory and trauma. She is currently finishing two projects: a book titled Open Secrets: Intimacy Between Street and Home, and a memoir-slash-cookbook, Kitchen Stories: Essays on Food, Love, and Loss. She is the author of Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint, and co-editor of the 2013 volume Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn. Her criticism has been published in Art in America, Bookforum, Time Out New York, and Art Margins.