Sebile Yapici, Frankfurt Goethe University

“Socialist Appetizers, Plov and Vodka – Imagining Uzbek food in New York City”

Focusing on the Uzbek diasporic community in the USA, Sebile Yapici’s work investigates the role of food in the formation of a transnational ethnic identity. The main field research sites –neighborhoods in New York City dominated by immigrants from the ex-Soviet republics – are spaces of shared life and offer the opportunity to investigate which narratives inherited from their past produce difference and what are the similarities among them.

            Walking through the neighborhood of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn/NYC one can smell, see and hear the importance of food. The Soviet Union influenced the foodscape all over its territory by promoting various national cuisines in order to create a shared Soviet identity. In the Post-Soviet era, after independence of almost all former Soviet Republics, national cuisines became a tool to set boundaries between them. In migration however those boundaries become porous – due to shared space and a shared past. National imagination changes over time and location.

            This research seeks to answer the following questions:  how is a transnational identity built between a shared Soviet past and the present nationalism; between a collective-focused community and a individualistic western lifestyle; between being far away from home and still very close to the former home due to affordable ticket prices and modern communication; between socialist atheism, rising Islam and Islamophobia? She is interested in interrogating the role food plays in such transnational imaginations.

Sebile Yapici studied Turkology and Central Asian Studies in Berlin and Istanbul. She is a graduate student at Goethe University Frankfurt in social anthropology. She has conducted field research in Samarkand, Uzbekistan and is currently conducting field research in Brooklyn, New York.