Eating Together

Food, Space, and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore

Jean Duruz and Gaik Cheng Khoo

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.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 278 • Trim: 6½ x 9⅜

978-1-4422-2740-8 • Hardback • December 2014 • $109.00 • (£84.00)

978-1-4422-2741-5 • eBook • December 2014 • $103.50 • (£80.00)

Series: Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy

Subjects: Social Science / Agriculture & Food, Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural, Social Science / Regional Studies, Cooking / History

Eating Together

Food, Space, and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore

Hardback

eBook

Summary

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.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 278 • Trim: 6½ x 9⅜

978-1-4422-2740-8 • Hardback • December 2014 • $109.00 • (£84.00)

978-1-4422-2741-5 • eBook • December 2014 • $103.50 • (£80.00)

Series: Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy

Subjects: Social Science / Agriculture & Food, Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural, Social Science / Regional Studies, Cooking / History

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Making Rojak … or Eating “Together-in-Difference”?
1: Kopitiam: In Search of Cosmopolitan Spaces and Meanings in Malaysia
2: Spreading the Toast of Memory: From Hainanese Kopitiams to Boutique Coffee Shops in Singapore
3: “Mamak, Anyone?”: Tamil Muslim Eateries in Malaysia
4: Growing up Transnational: Travelling through Singapore’s Hawker Centers
5: Dumplings at Changi: Singapore’s Urban Villages as Spaces of Exchange and Re-invention
6: The Little Nyonya and Peranakan Chinese Identity: Between Commodification and Cosmopolitanism
7: Currying the Nation: A Song and Dance about Multiculturalism
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors

Reviews

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.
— Asian Studies Review

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

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.
— Sneja Gunew, FRSC, Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies

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.
— Krishnendu Ray, Chair, Department of Nutrition, Food Studies & Public Health, New York University; President, Association for the Study of Food & Society