Zahra Taheri--Culinary Habits and Biopolitical Surveillance and Stratification in Sattouf’s The Arab of .mp4

Riad Sattouf’s graphic novel, The Arab of Future, has been described by different critics as a compelling example of narratives engaging with themes of race and humanist ideology. As a memoir chronicling Sattouf’s life from birth to young boyhood in sequels, his work offers a parallel portrayal of the West and the non-West and reinforces the hierarchical structure of “us” versus “them” through a stereotypical representation of grotesque Arab children and monstrous and bigot Arab men. Despite Sattouf’s claims of apoliticality, the juxtaposition of Libya, Syria, and France in his oeuvre—represented through different colors—invokes the “civilized/uncivilized” dichotomy and perpetuates racial discourse. Oddly have few critics focused on the Sattouf’s instrumentalization of food, culinary habits, and ways of serving to represent this ideology. Nor has much attention been paid to the marks such deployment leaves in Westerners’ memory. This paper, thus, tries to discuss how food, as the most politically charged motif in The Arab of Future 1 and 2, transcends its conventional role as a mere source of sustenance and pleasure and functions as a medium for biopolitical surveillance, social stratification, and gender construction. It is argued since Riad, the focal character, is too young to be directly engaged with political themes, Sattouf’s narrative employs the concept of food to establish a comparative framework for the reader to see the similarity and differences between the West/ non-West, ‘us/them.’ This treatment of culinary practices reveals not only the politicization of food (and the blurring of the private and public spheres) but also the role it plays in the formation of identity schemata and the production of docile bodies.