Blood and Honey: Culinary Nationalism and Yugonostalgia in a Canadian City

Abstract

ABSTRACT For decades, the very same markers one used to identify national and ethnic belonging in the “homeland,” such as history, language, and ritual, have been the same indicators deployed in diaspora communities to demarcate their level of group identity both within the assimilatory, hegemonic, and new national identity (eg., “Canadian”), as well as against other ethnic minorities. Members of the Balkan diaspora in North America very much perform their Serb, Croatian, or Bosniak identities through the way they talk about food. But there exists a split in Balkan food identity which overlaps with a fundamental political identity: those who see, for example, Serb cuisine as unique tend to be proudly, nationalistically Serb, while those who see a common Balkan cuisine are more likely to identify with a federalist, shared Yugoslav past.