| Sumario: | Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with members of the Tamil diaspora in the greater Paris region, I demonstrate the central role of food in expressing and transmitting Tamil ethnic identity through food consumption and culinary practices. I contextualize this within the framework of gastronationalism, which not only affirms the exceptionalism of French cuisine but also maintains the exclusionary borders of proper (gastro-)citizenship. I argue that maintaining public spaces of Tamil culinary culture in Paris constitutes a gastro-political counter-strategy to dominant French gastronationalism by affirming an ethos of gastro-cosmopolitanism as simultaneously Tamil and Parisian. That is, Tamil gastro-cosmopolitanism offers a way to resist the pressures of assimilation while pushing back against accusations of improper assimilation by valorizing Tamil food as part of Paris' gastro-cosmopolitan foodscape. I situate the gastro-cosmopolitan identity-work of French-Tamils within contemporary French political debates—including the invocation by the French Interior Minister of "communitarian cuisine" as a threat to French national security—and simultaneously in terms of unsettled conceptions of Tamil diasporic identity itself, in which salient divisions—notably along the lines of national and caste-based distinctions—are expressed through diasporic gastro-politics in which food is also a powerful symbolic means of expressing distinctions between Tamil communities in Paris. Through an ethnographic analysis of Tamil gastro-cosmopolitanism in Paris, this article updates understandings of French culinary identity—long grounded in the notions of terroir and haute cuisine—to reflect the diverse reality of foodscapes in contemporary France.
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