Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

2026

DOI

10.37514/PEI-J.2026.28.2.06

Publication Title

Pietho

Volume

28

Issue

2

Pages

94-96

Abstract

[Introduction] Edited by Linda S. Svitak and Christin Jaye Eaton, with Lee Svitak Dean, and published by the University of Minnesota Press, Kitchens of Hope: Immigrants Share Stories of Resilience and Recipes from Home (2025) fits neatly into the popular genre network of cookbooks that blend essay with recipe, mixing memoir with meals perfected over generations. But this book doesn't simply share the legacy of Liberian rice bread or summer beat soup. It explores the migration of these dishes and their cooks, contextualizing stories of displacement and development. Because of the breadth of this book, Mikhail Bakhtin might describe this collection as a chronotope of sorts, a configuration of time and space that "takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible" (qtd. in Bemong & Borghart, 2010, p. 4). Through Omedi Ochieng's lens of chronotopian humanitarianism, this book is a rhetorical tool for feminist scholarship seeking to counter a Eurocentric understanding of how and why people and stories move around and through the world.

Rights

© for individual articles and other publications is held by their respective authors.

Articles and other publications in Peitho are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License.

Comments

(Publisher landing page) https://doi.org/10.37514/PEI-J.2026.28.2.06

Original Publication Citation

Prokop, M. (2026). The diasporic cookbook as chronotope. [Review of the book Kitchens of hope: Immigrants share stories of resilience and recipes from home, by l. S. Svitak, C. J. Eaton and l. S. Dean (Eds.)]. Pietho, 28(2), 94-96. https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/peitho/v28n2/prokop.pdf

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