Tastes and Politics of Inter-Cultural Food in Australia

Sukhmani Khorana is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Wollongong. She is the editor of a Routledge anthology titled, Crossover Cinema (2013). Sukhmani has published extensively on diasporic cultures, multi-platform refugee narratives, and the politics of empathy. She ? holds a current ARC Linkage grant (with the Museum of Victoria and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image) examining the role of television in the experience of migration to Australia.

• Introduction: Food Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Urban Australia/ Part I: The Local/ 1. South Asian Grocery Stores in a Sydney Suburb: Conviviality in Transit/ 2. ‘The Welcome Dinner Project’ and ‘Eat Street’ Markets: Local Efforts to Mingle Over Food/ Part II: The Global/ 3. Masterchef: Selling a Cosmopolitan Australia/ 4.Australians in Hanoi: When Street Food Tours are Safely Exotic/ Part III: The Glocal/ 5.Food Safari: Does Maeve O’Maera replace the Aussie male adventurer?/ 6. Tales from ‘Foodie’ Creative Migrants Interviews/ Conclusion: Ethical and Reflexive Food Practices/ Index

Food has always been central to how we live together and, as this book acutely shows, how we become more than who we are. Eschewing a superficial white, middle class cosmopolitanism for an understanding of cosmopolitanisation as process, Sukhmani Khorana cleverly examines, across a range of sites, the way food is central to everyday intercultural politics – and gender and class – in Australia. This offers, she argues, the possibility for a critical, resistant conviviality and a more ethical way of living in diversity. This is a must read for all cosmo-multiculturalists!