Eating Together

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 Angs 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 contradictionswhether 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.