Pedagogies of the Alimentary: Taste, Memory and Identity in and out of Asia

Panel in the 7th Annual International ADI Conference on Food, Feeding and Eating In and Out of Asia

Convenor: Francis Maravillas, University of Technology Sydney

This panel will present a series of papers concerned with food as an object, medium and technology of sensory learning and remembering across a range of sites in and out of Asia (Sutton 2010; Holzmann 2006). Speaking to several themes in the conference, the panel takes as its point of departure the pedagogical effects of food as both a sensuous and embodied experience and as a site for the recall and production of memory (Flowers and Swan 2012, 2015). Focusing on questions of sensory learning, the processes of racialisation and othering, the meaning of authenticity and the construction of place, the panel will explore the complexities inherent in the formations of taste, memory and identity through the production, consumption and (re)presentation of food. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives and empirical case studies – the representation of hawker food in Penang, the presentation of a ‘Chinese food masterclass’ in Sydney and the use of food in visual art practices in Southeast Asia – the panel seeks to foreground the various ways in which eating, feeding and tasting bodies learn about the past, and construct identities and places through food in a region deeply marked by multiple and complexly entangled colonial and postcolonial histories, and by contemporary globalised processes of remembering, forgetting and sensing.

Francis Maravillas is an Associate researcher at the Transforming Cultures Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney.