Eating Together

Food, Space, and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore

By (author) Jean Duruz, Gaik Cheng Khoo

Not available to order

Publication date:

18 December 2014

Length of book:

278 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442227415

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.

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

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.