Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1800-0784
Date Available
8-15-2026
Year of Publication
2024
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
Anthropology
First Advisor
Dr. Lisa Cliggett
Abstract
In this dissertation, I explore the intersection of identity, race, migration, and food by investigating the everyday culinary practices of three generations of the Ethiopian diaspora in DeKalb County, Georgia; these diasporic communities reside at the margins of multiple cultural edges, occupying what I refer to as a culinary frontier. Despite their claims of pan-Ethiopian ethnic identities, these diasporic households experience a significant process of minoritization, driven by entrenched racial tropes that exoticize and define their complex belongingness to the Ethiopian national culinary identity. Such process leads to experiences of deprivation and dispossession within the Southern US food geography, marked by food deserts resulting from limited access to quality and culturally relevant food in markets dominated by large corporations. These multigenerational diasporic households perceive this process as a source of food insecurity, urban blight, and the experiences of violence and crime—a reality that predominantly affects the second and subsequent generations. In response to these challenges, these households are involved in transnational food agri-commodity networks, utilizing kin-based strategies and forging trans-ethnic solidarities to navigate the complex racial, ethnic, gendered, and generational structures that contribute to food inequities.
This dissertation argues that these multigenerational Ethiopian households navigate dominant structures and culinary relations primarily reconfigured by racialized food tropes that further minoritize Afro-diasporic households.Drawing on 16 months of fieldwork in DeKalb County, Georgia, I investigate how these processes of marginalization are not only perpetuated, but also complicated by internal power contestations, intensifying the challenges of marginalization and dispossession faced by these families. Moreover, I examine the generational and ethnic agencies these families deploy to mitigate the process of minoritization and to mend structural inequities underlying the contemporary challenges they face in accessing culturally relevant food. With this perspective, I identify acts of resistance by multigenerational households as they negotiate to create a space for themselves in the American South by leveraging their immigration histories and racialized spatial experiences to embrace a 'pan-Ethiopian' culinary identity in the diaspora. This study further explores how each generation positions itself within transnational spaces and the U.S. food system, negotiating for inclusion, representation, and solidarity to overcome the structural and generational hurdles traversing fluid ethnic culinary boundaries
KEYWORDS: Afro-Diasporic Cuisine: Black food geographies, ethnic food, Habesha, Identity, Multigenerational Households, Transnational Lifeways.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2024.351
Recommended Citation
Reda, Aklilu, "AFRO-DIASPORIC CUISINE: FOOD, IDENTITY, AND TRANSNATIONAL LIFE WAYS OF “ETHIOPIAN” MIGRANTS IN ATLANTA" (2024). Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology. 69.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/anthro_etds/69
Included in
Africana Studies Commons, African Studies Commons, Civic and Community Engagement Commons, Community-Based Research Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Food Studies Commons, Human Geography Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Migration Studies Commons, Place and Environment Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, Social Justice Commons
