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CANCELED: Cooking, Eating, Remembering: Dynamic Histories of Food, Culture, Knowledge, and Place in South Asia

This panel calls for papers to critically explore histories of food, culture, and place that constitute and contribute toward culinary knowledge, foodways, and culinary practices of, and from South Asia, its regions, localities, and borderlands.

Convenor:

· Jayeeta Sharma University of Toronto (Toronto, Canada)

Long Abstract

This panel seeks to critically explore histories of food, culture, and place that constitute and contribute toward a broad body of culinary knowledge, foodways, and culinary practices of, and from South Asia.

It invites scholars to problematize relationships, practices, and institutions that connect people, food, and place, how they are imagined and produced (Duruz, 2016). It concurs with a scholarly view that sees as nearly impossible that food cultures align with boundaries that are assigned to nations, it presents the premise that cuisines are never foods of a country, but foods of a place (Mintz, 1996). Foodways connotes historical, symbolic, political, social, religious, economic, and cultural factors that influence food choice and use, a fundamental of the cultural systems within which they are practiced (Adema, 2013); thus, cultural systems that connect to South Asia and its regions, localities, and borderlands.

The panel anticipates a series of dynamic papers that explore how interdisciplinary dialogues about a place can pose deep questions about the working of politics through attitudes to food, its laws and regulations; practices and boundaries of community, identities, and place-making around commensality, diets, cooking, and associated spaces; implicit and explicit food exclusions that coalesce around caste, gender, religion, language, and class; construction of personal and collective subjectivities and re/making cultural belonging and cultural heritage around eating, drinking, cooking, selling, buying, talking, writing, remembering food, and connected sensory, emotional, and performative elements.