‘Currying Identities’: A Literary Re-Crafting of South-Asian Identities through Diasporic Women’s Cookbooks

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper on currying identities presents an original hypothesis, to read cookbooks against the metrics of affective labor, and it challenges the notion of nostalgia (missing among the keywords), reading it not as a passive subjectivity but as bearing instead creative potential. It also uses Negri and Hardt's conceptualisation of affective labour and immaterial labour to free cooking from the domestic sphere of the household. However, the structuring of the argument can be improved, since the research question is stated in different moments in the article, and this instead of clarifying risks to produce multiple statements on the aims of the paper. Furthermore, the corpus of texts analysed in this paper is not properly introduced, nor makes it clear the passage to blogs in section 5 of the article (it would already be clarifying if this notion would be added to the section title?). Finally, the treatment of the different topics is uneven and could benefit from more coherence and less fragmentation. The explanation of Negri and Hardt's theory of affective labor in section 4 can be shortened and more to the point (from line 341 onwards the argument is more directly linked to the topic of the article). It would also be helpful to link better the different topics to a central research question, because now they read as a sum of different view points -- the treatment of curry in section 3 should be made more central to the argument since it figures in the title of the article? -- and the conclusions therefore seem to be a bit partial because not all the aspects of diasporic women's cookbooks are treated in the final remarks. The link between cookbooks and culinary fictions, and their literary character which is deemed essential by the author in deconstructing a number of myths on cookbooks, should also be explained in a more consistent manner. 

On the level of form and lay-out there are some issues that have to be addressed:

- lines 121-23: these are editorial comments?

- lines 143-45: check the syntax and quotation marks

- lines 200-204: quotation marks are missing? Should there be a hyphen before a block quote? This occurs several times in the text

- line 220: cookbook as literary space (not spaces)

- line 226: reconfigure (not reconfigures)

- line 229: Why does this title end with a hyphen?

- line 238: though acknowledging?

- line 255: avoid formulations such as "very significant": rather show then tell

- line 291: phenomenon in the quote is singular but in the sentence it should be in the plural

- line 293: originate (not originates)

- line 380: add blogs to the title?

- lines 385-90: a reference is missing here. The same goes for lines 406-09

- line 392: mention here the author's name (instead of in 395)

- lines 426-27: quotation marks are missing

- line 574: the notion of the Global South needs to be unpacked?

- line 621: italics are missing in the title

- lines 622-23: the reference is incomplete 

Author Response

Please see the attachment. Thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The aim of the paper and the approach to the main issues are original and present interesting aspects to elaborate on. However, due to a certain verbosity in discourse construction, the outcomes of the research are often unclear and unbalanced.

For example, the "feminist trajectories of knowledge" mentioned in lines 84-86 are not clearly defined.

Similarly, the "disruptive potential" in bypassing forms of heteropatriarchy (lines 98-99) is not clearly discussed. 

Other sentences are not immediately comprehensible:

 -"cookbooks offer the novel form the mould to set their identity markers" (130-131). The relationt between cookbooks and novels is not understandable

- "the cookbook throws open a whole range of ontological meanings mediated in the space of the kitchen" (245-246). Not clear which meanings and how they are mediated

- lines 328-330 are not conceptually clear

A closer reading and analysis of Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta's cookbook might be useful. This textual analysis is anticipated (lines 391-392) but it actually covers only a small part of the article that is instead more (maybe too much) focused on reconstructing a theoretical background that ends up being confusing. 

The whole paper needs to be linguistically revised as many syntactic and structural errors have been detected. For example see sentences in lines: 42-46; 73; 84-86; 110-112; 132; 168; 177-178; 252

Author Response

Please see the attachment. Thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The article adds interesting elements to the topic it addresses. I suggest the text be proofread before publication

Editing of English language required

Author Response

Thank you so much for your review of the article. We are grateful for your endorsement of our article. We have proofread the article to the best of our capability.

Reviewer 4 Report

This is a strong essay on the whole and makes an original argument for women's cookbooks as a form of biopolitical, affective, and social reproductive labor. I think the essay overstated the radicalism of this practice (how is entrepreneuralism anti-capitalist? Moreover, the practice described is are best non-capiitalist rather than anti-capitalist. I am also not persuaded by the use of ontology for specific gendered or postcolonial  states, but this is common practice now. On the whole, the article is strong and makes an important  contribution  to a number of fields--cultural studies, affect studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, etc.

The paper is well-written on the whole and the ESL issues are minor. Agreement issues were the only recurring problem. These are easily fixed with a careful proof read.

Author Response

Thank you so much for your review of our article. We are grateful for your positive words about the quality of the article. We have carefully proofread the article to the best of our capability.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I am glad to see that my comments have been useful to the authors. Focussing on the authors report and on the changes in yellow, I can conclude that this version is publishable. I would only recommend some further copy-editing of the bibliography where italics are missing in some titles, especially in the yellow parts. I would also suggest to check whether the names added in the lines 365-67 should be added to the bibliography as well. 

Author Response

Thank you once again for your painstaking review of our paper. The rigorous review process was a great learning experience for us. We have checked the bibliography for the errors and oversight in italics. We have made corrections to the best of our ability.