Through an interdisciplinary approach drawing from rhetorical, gender, and literary studies, this panel explores how immigrant and diasporic communities, who are often socially marginalized in the West, create hospitality for each other. In particular, food sites and practices make belonging possible in otherwise displaced circumstances. For example, Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart (2021) shows how ethnic grocery stores and restaurants are material spaces in which cultural memory is archived especially across generations. Similarly, Chithra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel The Mistress of Spices (1997) showcases how food stores can offer healing and sanctuary for a community. Moreover, we cannot separate hospitality discourse from the kitchen. On the one hand, kitchens historically confine women to one space where they are expected to perform gendered labor. On the other hand, texts like Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) offer insights into how kitchens are also intimate spaces where agency and identity are (re)constructed through preparing and sharing meals. Ultimately, through the medium of food sites, hospitality for immigrant and diasporic communities provide kinship by way of care. 

This panel invites papers that examine how literature, memoirs, films, and other cultural texts represent hospitality as rhetorically feminist for immigrant and diasporic communities. This panel is especially interested in papers that examine immigrant and diasporic texts taking place within American and British landscapes. By presenting hospitality as an embodied practice, this panel hopes to foster interdisciplinary conversation among rhetoric, gender, and literary studies that highlights how hospitality for immigrant and diasporic communities is inherently an ethics of care.

This is a traditional in-person panel. Panel members will have 15-20 minutes to discuss their work. The SAMLA 2026 conference will take place in Atlanta, GA from November 5-7th, 2026.