1st Edition
Palates of Pleasure Food, Memories and Culture
This book engages with the ways in which our habitual practices of cooking and eating uphold diverse forms of social, cultural, political, gendered, racialised, communal and geopolitical experiences of place and space. With diverse contributions from India, South Africa, Colombia, the United States, United Kingdom, and Jamaica, it discusses themes including modernity as a stuffed gourd; decolonising food in Colombia; culinary colonialism today; trijunction of colonialism, Hindu/India resistance, and hybridity; Hindu widows and forbidden food; Dutch colonisation of the Cape and its food sources in Bengal (India), Indonesia, and Malaysia; politicising the kitchens in India; and autoethnographic accounts of food, cooking, compliance and resistance, to underscore how patterns of cooking and eating build knowledge systems in daily life. The book also addresses the cultural and ethnic components of suppression, cultural expressions of food and belonging as is evidenced in Filipina American cultural identities marked by migration, pleasure and taste as a psycho-sexual construct at the Cape in South Africa where the enslaved understand the value of food and pleasure.
This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of cultural studies, philosophy, post-colonial studies, gender studies, food studies, food history, food anthropology, sociology, political sociology and social anthropology.
PART I: Colonisation of Culinary Cultures
1. Palates of Pleasure, from Hand to Mouth: Food Existentialism, and the Slave Trade at the Cape
Rozena Maart
2. Colombian Cuisine and the Histories of Colonialism and Enslavement That Shaped It
Juan Ignacio Solis-Arias
3. Jamaica’s Colonial Food History: Rozena Maart in Conversation with Lewis Ricardo Gordon
Rozena Maart and Lewis R. Gordon
PART II: Caste, Politics, Gender and Food
4. Exercising Power over Subaltern Bodies: Forbidden Foods and the Hindu Widows
Sukla Chatterjee
5. Eating with the "Others": Caste and Religious Battles Inside the Kitchen Spaces of India
Sayan Dey and Pritha Sarkar
6. Zulu Food, Indian Culture, and the Gentrification of Blackness: A New Indigenous Zulu Palate for KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa
Philile Langa and Rozena Maart
7. Filipina Food Culture in the United States: Rozena Maart in Conversation with Melinda de Jesús
Rozena Maart and Melinda de Jesús
PART III: Archipelagoes of Tastes
8. Food, Colonialism, and Enslavement across the Ocean: India and South Africa
Rozena Maart and V. Ratnamala
9. Mizo Ethnic Food Culture: Trijunction of Colonialism, Hindu/India Resistance, and Hybridity
Karen Donoghue, V. Ratnamala, and Christina L. Varte
Biography
Rozena Maart was born in District Six, the old slave quarter of Cape Town, South Africa. She has Bengali, Javanese and Indigenous Xhosa heritage. She loves food and loves cooking as do both sides of her family. She is also a mother and two years ago became a grandmother. She is the winner of “The Journey Prize: Best Short Fiction in Canada, 1992,” and two lifetime achievement awards in philosophy and literature, a Mercator Fellow at the University of Bremen for the Contradiction Studies programme and a Research Ambassador. She is a Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, where she is the South African Research Chair on The National Question and Chair of The National Question Network.
Sayan Dey is Bengali and was raised in Kolkata. Currently, he works as an Assistant Professor at Bayan College in Oman. He is also an Associate Fellow at the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University, Canada, a Critical Research Studies Faculty at The NYI Institute of Cultural, Cognitive and Linguistic Studies, New York, and an Affiliated Member of the Global Posthuman Network. His latest monographs are Green Academia: Towards Eco-friendly Education Systems (Routledge, 2022), Performing Memories, Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean (Anthem Press, 2023), and Garbocracy: Towards a Great Human Collapse (Peter Lang, 2025).
