Diasporic Spaces of Conviviality and Domesticity: On the Political Significance of Kitchens in Post-War Britain

My intervention starts at the site of the kitchen, a space that remains often understood as a private site of gendered domestic labour. In this article, I examine how the British modernized post-war kitchen became valorized as a sphere of women’s labour. The ‘ideal kitchen’ reinscribed raced and gendered ideas about the family. For incoming Black and South Asian families, the inferiority of sub-standard housing, facilitated by the de facto colour bar, became ingrained in emerging forms of public racism about the lifestyles of incomers. Yet kitchens, and the food prepared within them, provided sites that have been critical to the flourishing of diasporic communities. The diverse food practices within the kitchen contribute to changing everyday spaces of culture and disrupt dominant racialized narratives of food preparation and consumption exceeding the boundaries of the kitchen. For planning scholars and practitioners, there is a need for greater connections to be made between public and private spaces and the normative visions they reveal. These issues become all the more urgent in an era of declining housing standards that disproportionality affect Black and minority communities.