Embodied Histories: Foodways, Gendered Inequality, and Decolonial Memory in Dream Count
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18533/j8hwkw65Abstract
This paper examines how Dream Count employs food and foodways as central narrative strategies for interrogating memory, gendered labor, class hierarchy, and African diasporic identity. Rather than treating the COVID-19 pandemic as its thematic anchor, the novel uses lockdown stillness as a sensory frame through which long-silenced emotions and intergenerational memories emerge (Adichie, 2025). Drawing on Fanon’s (1963) theories regarding the preservation of historical trauma in everyday life and Avakian’s (1997) feminist analysis of food as emotional labor, this study explores seven interconnected dimensions: sensory memory and colonial echoes; gendered domestic labor; classed taste and refinement; food as control and spiritual anxiety; pandemic-sharpened introspection; intra-African culinary difference; and communal meals as defiant acts of healing. Across these layers, food emerges as both an archive and a battleground—preserving colonial memory, exposing social inequities, and revealing the emotional cost of navigating diasporic belonging (Bogues, 2010; Sharpe, 2016). Yet the novel also highlights food’s restorative potential, showing how shared meals can facilitate the recovery of voice and community. Ultimately, this paper argues that Dream Count transforms everyday food practices into powerful narrative tools that illuminate structures of inequality while modeling subtle forms of resistance and renewal.
Keywords: foodways, Dream Count, African diasporic identity, Adichie
References
Adichie, C. N. (2025). Dream count. Vintage.
Avakian, A. V. (1997). Through the kitchen window: Women explore the intimate meanings of food and cooking. Beacon Press.
Bogues, A. (2010). The politics of the ordinary: Caribbean philosophy. University of Massachusetts Press.
Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1961) .
Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1952) .
Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Duke University Press.
Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Duke University Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Afaf Mohsen Alhumaidi
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
