Digital Food and foodways. How online food practices and narratives shape the Italian diaspora

The article discusses the role of online food practices and narratives in the formation of transnational identities and communities. Data has been collected in the framework of a doctoral research project undertaken by the author between 2009 and 2012 with a follow-up in 2014. The working hypothesis of this article is that the way Italians talk about food online and offline, the importance they give to ‘authentic’ food, and the way they share their love for Italian food with other members of the same diaspora reveal original insights into migrants’ personal and collective identities, their sense of belonging to the transnational community and processes of adjustment to a new place. Findings suggest that online culinary narratives and practices shape the Italian diaspora in unique ways, through the development of forms of virtual commensality and online mealtime socialization on Skype and by affecting intra and out-group relationships, thus working as elements of cultural identification and differentiation

The violent frontline: space, ethnicity and confronting the state in Edwardian Spitalfields and 1980s Brixton

This article discusses in comparative terms the relationship between space, ethnic identity, subaltern status and anti-state violence in twentieth century London. It does so by comparing two examples in which the control of the state, as represented by the Metropolitan Police, was challenged by minority groups through physical force. It will examine the Spitalfields riots of 1906, which began as strike action by predominantly Jewish bakers and escalated into a general confrontation between the local population and the police, and the Brixton riots of 1981, a response to endemic police harassment of mainly Caribbean youth and long-term economic discrimination in that area of South London. It will begin by dissecting the association of physical metropolitan space with the diasporic ‘other’ in the Edwardian East End and post-consensus South London, and how this ‘othering’ was influenced both by the state and the anti-migrant far right. It will then interrogate the difficult relationship between the Metropolitan Police and Jewish and Caribbean working class communities, and how this deteriorating relationship exploded into in extreme violence in 1906 and 1981. The article will conclude by assessing how the relationships between space, identity and violence influenced long-term national and communal narratives of Jewish and Caribbean interactions with the British state

Food as a matter of being : experiential continuity in transnational lives

This chapter is based on the research project “The Transnational Life of Objects: Material Practices of Migrants’ Being and Belonging,” which promotes a broad interest in how objects constitute transnational social spaces established by migrants and by their counterparts who stayed behind. The question of how people make choices, exercise agency and create continuity in conditions of transnational migration is pursued, with the focus on objects and material practices. Deliberations around the meanings of “the taste of home” are plentiful in the intersected fields of food, migration and material culture studies, and tend to focus on identity and memory. Indeed, food can be interpreted as a material expression of belonging, status or family history, or of social and cultural difference. Food can be central to migrants’ creation of places of remembrance or pride, mourning or celebration, privacy or symbolic communion, or economic connection with the relatives who stayed behind. As the negotiation of belonging often entails communication through objects, food parcels are involved in multifaceted quests and attempts to belong. However, by presenting and discussing some ethnographic examples of sensuous aspects of transnational interconnections in situations of physical separation, I promote a complementary approach that centres on the materiality of food and food-related objects and practices