| Riassunto |
The aim of this special issue of Continuum is to focus on food markets as significant spaces of intercultural exchange, everyday belonging, and citizenship. Contributions to the issue are informed by two crucial questions: in contemporary cosmopolitan cities, how do people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds manage the task of living together; and further, how do cities' shared but distinct histories of colonialism-postcolonialism in the "tropics" of the Southeast Asian region shape everyday interactions in public spaces? Food markets (stretching their definition to include other sites of informal "public" eating - food halls, hawker centres, street stalls, "ethnic" cafes, coffee shops) are regarded here as somewhat neglected but extremely resonant sites for addressing such questions. These are places where people from diverse backgrounds (vested in differences in class, ethnicity, gender, age, generation, and so on) "converge to buy and sell food, conduct business, share news and information, as well as to engage in various social, cultural, religious, and political practices" (Ahluwalia 2003). In these papers then, the food market becomes a particularly beguiling research landscape, representing cosmopolitanism in a microcosm, with hybridity a hallmark of its everyday interactions. Entering the microcosm, papers in this issue examine food markets as spaces in which rigid, racialized identities are disrupted by physical intimacy and exchanges, and where older colonial forms are being reworked and recaptured to reflect new cosmopolitan experiences. |
