Overview

Accepting the challenge of rethinking connections of food, space and identity within everyday spaces of public eating in Malaysia and Singapore, the authors enter street stalls, hawker centers, markets, cafes, restaurants, food streets, and ethnic neighborhoods to offer a broader picture of the meaning of eating in public places. The book creates a strong sense of the ways different people live, eat, work, and relax together, and traces negotiations and accommodations in these dynamics. The motif of rojak (Malay, meaning mixture ), together with Ien Ang s evocative together-in-difference, enables the analysis to move beyond the immediacy of street eating with its moments of exchange and remembering. Ultimately, the book traces the political tensions of different people living together, and the search for home and identity in a world on the move. Each of the chapters designates a different space for exploring these cultures of mixedness and their contradictions whether these involve old and new forms of sociality, struggles over meanings of place, or frissons of pleasure and risk in eating differently. Simply put, Eating Together is about understanding complex forms of multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore through the mind, tongue, nose, and eyes.

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9781322520155

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Reviews

Richly imagined and analyzed, the authors explore what public eating spaces can tell us about contemporary nostalgia, cosmopolitanism and localism. Eating Together takes us into the heart of the tastes, smells, sounds and sights of public commonality in Singapore and Malaysia.--David Sutton, Southern Illinois University

Author Information

Jean Duruz, PhD, is an adjunct senior research fellow at the Hawke Research Institute of the University of South Australia. Her research has been published in journals such as New Formations; Cultural Studies Review; Emotion, Space and Society; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; Space and Culture; Gastronomica. She has also contributed to various anthologies, such as Food and Foodways in Asia; Everyday Multiculturalism; and Chinese Food and Foodways in Southeast Asia and Beyond. Recently, she co-edited and contributed to special issues of Continuum and Cultural Studies Review. Gaik Cheng Khoo, PhD, is associate professor ofFilm and Television Studies, University of Nottingham--Malaysia. She is the author of Reclaiming Adat: Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature (2006). Her research focus is on film, food, identity and cultural politics in Malaysia. She has published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Asian Cinema, South East Asia Research, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Concentric and various anthologies, including Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham's Everyday Multiculturalism. Her more recent publications on Malaysian civil society and cosmopolitan solidarity between citizens and non-citizens appear in Asian Studies Review, Citizenship Studies and anthologies.

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