Eating Together - (Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy) by Jean Duruz & Gaik Cheng Khoo (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book analyzes cultures of eating together in Malaysia and Singapore. It explores everyday spaces, such as street stalls, hawker centers, and coffee shops. Reflecting on these as sites for people's "different" culinary exchanges, the book captures resonances of national, e...

Book Synopsis

This book analyzes cultures of eating together in Malaysia and Singapore. It explores everyday spaces, such as street stalls, hawker centers, and coffee shops. Reflecting on these as sites for people's "different" culinary exchanges, the book captures resonances of national, ethnic, cosmopolitan and multicultural identity.

Review Quotes

Duruz and Khoo demonstrate brilliantly that employing the semiotics of food renders legible the unexpected everyday negotiations involved in accommodating the nuances of national policies governing citizenship in Malaysia and Singapore. Given their histories of migration, conquest and ethnic composition, anxieties in both nations give rise to attempts to curb potential irruptions of communal conflict by legislating every aspect of inter-ethnic relations but places where citizens congregate to eat also allow for ways to thwart such containment. The book astutely maps the ways in which the rich sedimentation of local culinary habits modifies commodified globalisation.

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.

The book will be of interest to researchers in food, Southeast Asian and cultural studies. . . .A key strength of the volume is that, while clearly a work of combined case studies, it ultimately resists fragmentation because of the authors' palpable, shared intellectual (and social) passion for their subject matter. The distinctly collaborative nature of Eating Together enhances the rojak motif that the authors pursue throughout the book.

This book is a testament to the possibility of bringing together rich sensuous writing with a sensible politics of eating-together-in-difference that avoids the dual traps of easy sentimentalism about palatal multiculturalism and cynicism about cross-cultural exchanges. That is a remarkable achievement which opens many sensory, ethical, and critical possibilities.

About the Author

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.