Very Abstract Paper Abstract

Like Sarah, I would like to apologize for my tardiness. Here's my belated, and still fairly formative, abstract:

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I would like to examine the function of food and cuisine in contemporary migrant cinema in Germany. I intend to look at food both as a representative of ethnic and national cultural traditions, and as a new global/transnational phenomenon, in part using the McDisneyization framework outlined by Allan and Liska. How can food function as a bridge between the migrant and the tourist? I am thinking specifically of the frequent pattern in Germany of immigrants opening a restaurant that serves their particular ethnic cuisine, which Germans in turn visit to satisfy a touristic desire to experience the exotic. I am also interested in the literal and figurative questions of consumption that surround the ethnic food industry.

Specifically, I would like to examine food as a trope in three exemplary films from contemporary Germany: Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen, Christian Petzold's Jerichow, and Thomas Arslan's Dealer. All three films deal with German multiculturalism, but in a way that "backgrounds" political discourse. Akin's film is essentially a romantic-meets-family comedy, Petzold's a forbidden romance, and Arslan's a social realist urban drama about life on the margins and the slow drift into criminality. All three films, however, employ food--and, specifically, the immigrant-owned restaurant--in different ways that speak to the cultural flows and transnational impulses of contemporary German cinema, something I would like to explore and elucidate in this paper.