FOODWAYS: DIASPORIC DINERS, TRANSNATIONAL TABLES AND CULINARY CONNECTIONS

Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto

Please join us for the 2012 Annual Conference of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto

Thursday October 4 – Sunday, October 7, 2012

Description:

This conference seeks to address questions surrounding the dynamics of the food ‘we’ eat, the ways in which ‘we’ eat, the meaning ‘we’ give to eating, and the effect of eating in a transnational world. Recognizing that culinary culture is central to diasporic identifications, the focus is on the place of food in the enduring habits, rituals, and everyday practices that are collectively used to produce and sustain a shared senses of cultural identity. Yet even as it does this work, food and the practices of production, preparation and consumption that revolve around it, cannot help but be drawn into wider cultures and cultural politics of consumption increasingly grounded in the pursuit of qualities of difference, acts of distinction and questions of justice. This focus on food, cooking, and eating in diaspora and its role in connecting and changing peoples, places, tastes, and sensibilities around the world yields insight not only to substances that people consider essential to the maintenance of identity, but to the production of new cultural political formations in a transnational world and to the role of cultural (re)production in the expansion of consumption under contemporary capitalism.  A focus on food also reveals the dynamic role of historical pathways in understanding cultural formations as they have existed through time, and in positioning the present as a moment in a continuing process of structured mobility that directs the movement of people, what they eat, and how they understand themselves and the world around them.  It also yields insight into the multiple places and ways in which food assumes value and how that value is often reliant upon the continued reproduction of ties that bind people, place, and practice across space and time. A great deal of academic work explores this interplay of food, practice, identity and subject formation, much of it bound together by a commitment that through a fuller understanding of those relations, we better understand ourselves, our pasts, and the complexities of the spaces and lives we inhabit and enact in a transnational world.  This conference seeks to enhance that understanding.