Are Baklava and Burgers Enough? Seeking Cosmopolitanism through Culinary Practices, Food, and Food Cultures in Perikles Monioudis’sLandand Yadé Kara’sCafe Cyprus

Abstract

Recent theories of cosmopolitanism address how individuals grapple on the everyday level with the intermingling of cultures and the experience of borders in the current era of globalization. In this article, close readings of the novels Land (2007) by Perikles Monioudis and Cafe Cyprus (2008) by Yadé Kara investigate the ways in which the depicted food cultures and practices, food pathways, and consumption tendencies, as well as the use of alimentary metaphors, problematize extant and negotiate new notions of cosmopolitanism as well as posit everyday acts of cosmopolitan agency as a means to cultivate a nascent sense of transnational community and belonging, albeit one that is ephemeral and fraught with conflict, fissures, and failure. I argue that the notions of cosmopolitanism and “cosmopolitan borderwork” forwarded in these texts appeal for the recognition of everyday practices, modes of consciousness, and forms of transnational affiliation tied to the sensory experiences provided by food in order to inform more ethical practices of cosmopolitanism in the twenty-first century.