The 97th annual SAMLA Conference is taking place Thursday, November, 6, through Saturday, November, 8, 2025, at the Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel & Conference Center in Atlanta, GA.  For more information, see https://southatlanticmla.org/.

This panel invites papers on the topic of how food memoirs serve as a rhetorical prism through which cultural knowledge is explored and constructed for marginalized, immigrant, and/or diasporic writers. For these writers, writing about and through food is a tool of reclaiming dominant and often oversimplified representations placed on them. By analyzing a variety of food memoirs, this panel will examine how marginalized, immigrant, and/or diasporic writers use food as a rhetorical prism to navigate belonging, challenge dominant narratives of their culture, and reclaim epistemic authority of their culinary histories.