Eating Together Food, Space, and Identity in Malaysia and Singapore [Hardcover]

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.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.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.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.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 bol£•