“How authentic is your curry”? performing curry and diasporic identity in Naben Ruthnum’s <i>Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I examine Indo-Mauritian-Canadian author Naben Ruthnum’s memoir-essay Curry: Eating, Reading, Race (2017) in order to examine the veracity of the dominant perception of South Asian diasporic identity as a collective designation through its association with the ubiquitous dish of curry which embodies a predominant cultural signifier of an extensively diverse population. Ruthnum’s significant aim is to challenge the existence of a supposedly authentic Indian curry and also to question the risk-averse publishing industry which solicits stories steeped in stereotypically authentic and nostalgic experiences from the second or third generation South Asian diasporic authors. Through an exploration of many ideas of authenticity and multiple ways of cooking the diverse dish of curry, I argue that diasporic authenticity is more appropriately performed not through replication and preservation of the past, but through constant recreation and reinvention of an individual’s present predicaments. Authenticity in diaspora is, therefore, unique and individual, and an embodiment of personal history. As there are many truths to the same story, and many versions of the same story, there are multiple ways of cooking authentic curries and diverse modes of confronting one’s own self as a South Asian diasporic in the world.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".