Afghanistan Remembers: Gendered Narrations of Violence and Culinary Practices

“Dossa’s approach is to look at the memory of violence among women in Afghanistan and in Canada, which demonstrates how the act of remembering and sharing history can empower women and reshape and re-appropriate global narratives about conflict. Less a study of civic groups and more a reflection on the women who inhabit them, her text demonstrates some of the ways disenfranchised individuals can use everyday practices around things like food to resist the relentless oppression of the memory of violence.” Noah Coburn, Bennington College, PoLAR Online

“Afghanistan Remembers makes an important contribution to the literature on memory and memorialization, the gender relations of war, immigration and diaspora studies, and the political economy and anthropology of food. The detailed, richly layered telling of the women’s stories is exceptional, as is Dossa’s analysis of them.” Wenona Giles, Department of Anthropology, York University

“Afghanistan Remembers is engaged anthropology at its best: innovative, responsive, nuanced.  This compelling ethnography explores the ways gendered violences of war and dislocation resonate across families in Afghanistan to resettlements in Canada – impacting the inner spaces of people’s everyday lives as not-quite-articulated knowledge. But these memories also convey political truths and illuminate injustices – revealing the unknown workings of violence. Through these women’s narratives and culinary lives, Dossa shows how stories and ‘food as performance’ can reveal, and begin to heal, the impact of violence on the inner recesses of life.” Carolyn R. Nordstrom, Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame