Call for Book Chapters:
Heritage Meets Modernity:Memory, Identity, Community, and Millennial Transformations

An Edited Volume under the ICSSR Major Research Project
(2024-2025): Heritage Meets Modernity: Millennial Interventions in Redefining Kolkata's Culinary Topography
Jadavpur University, Kolkata

The Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR)-supported Major Research Project, Heritage Meets Modernity: Millennial Interventions in Redefining Kolkata's Culinary Topography (2024-2025), invites abstracts for an upcoming edited volume arising from the research undertaken during the course of the project. The proposed volume is being developed for publication as part of the Food and Cultures from the Global South series by Peter Lang, a series devoted to advancing interdisciplinary scholarship on food, culture, politics, ecology, labour, and society within Global South contexts. Over the last two decades, food studies has increasingly moved beyond the domain of gastronomy and consumption to emerge as a significant site of critical inquiry across the humanities and social sciences.

Scholars such as Arjun Appadurai, Sidney Mintz, Pierre Bourdieu, David Sutton, Carole Counihan, Krishnendu Ray, and Lisa Heldke have demonstrated that food practices are deeply implicated in the production of social relations, collective memory, identity formation, structures of labour, and systems of power. More recent interventions within heritage studies and sensory ethnography have further argued that culinary practices function not merely as traditions to be preserved, but as dynamic and contested forms of cultural production embedded within questions of migration, precarity, ecology, urbanisation, and capital.

Yet, despite this growing body of scholarship, food cultures in South Asia, particularly within urban and neighbourhood contexts continue to remain under-theorised. Existing narratives frequently oscillate between two reductive frameworks: on the one hand, nostalgic celebrations of
"authentic cuisine", and on the other, market-driven gastronomic representations that commodify culture into consumable aesthetics. Such approaches often flatten the social worlds through which food circulates and obscure the histories of labour, caste, migration, community formation, gendered domesticity, and urban transformation that structure culinary practices.

This volume seeks to intervene within these limitations by approaching food not simply as an object of taste, but as a historically layered cultural archive. Drawing upon frameworks from memory studies, cultural anthropology, urban studies, migration studies, heritage discourse, and platform studies, the collection seeks to understand how culinary practices mediate relationships between past and present, intimacy and commerce, locality and circulation, continuity and transformation.
Situated within the context of Kolkata, the volume proposes the city not merely as a geographical backdrop, but as a historically sedimented foodscape shaped by multiple encounters - colonial trade routes, refugee mobilities, maritime histories, industrial labour migrations, and community settlements. Kolkata's culinary landscape continues to bear the imprint of these movements and negotiations.

The Chinese breakfast traditions of Tiretta Bazaar, the transformed Indo-Chinese food cultures of Tangra, the Ramadan foodscape of Zakaria Street, the Anglo-Indian culinary memory of Bow Barracks, and the layered histories of Armenian, Jewish, Mughlai, Bengali, and port-city food cultures collectively reveal how food operates as a repository of both memory and movement. These spaces simultaneously function as neighbourhood archives, sensory landscapes, informal economies, and sites of inter-community encounter.

At the same time, these culinary worlds are undergoing rapid transformation under the pressures of platform capitalism, tourism economies, digital visibility, changing consumption practices, and urban redevelopment. Food delivery applications, algorithmic visibility, influencer cultures, lifestyle branding, and curated digital aesthetics have fundamentally altered the ways in which food is produced, circulated, and consumed. Increasingly, culinary practices are negotiated not only within kitchens and neighbourhoods, but also through interfaces, platforms, hashtags, and visual economies.

The proposed volume is particularly interested in these tensions between heritage and circulation, preservation and commodification, memory and visibility. It seeks to interrogate how culinary practices move between domestic intimacy and market spectacle; between inherited recipes and platform-friendly innovation; between community-based food systems and digitally mediated consumption cultures.

The volume further seeks to foreground methodological innovation within food studies. Contributors are encouraged to engage critically with oral histories, sensory ethnography, neighbourhood studies, spatial humanities, visual archives, digital humanities, memory studies, and community-centred methodologies. Particular attention may also be paid to the politics of archiving food, the challenges of documenting ephemeral culinary practices, and the ethics of representing communities through food narratives.
Rather than treating cuisine as a stable or essentialised category, the collection welcomes contributions that interrogate the broader structures of power and inequality that shape food cultures - including caste hierarchies, gendered labour, migration, religion, ecology, class, race, and urban restructuring.

The volume invites contributions from scholars working across literary studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, history, media studies, urban studies, architecture, gender studies, migration studies, heritage studies, performance studies, geography, and allied disciplines.

Suggested Themes and Areas of Inquiry

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• Food, memory, and oral histories
• Culinary heritage and intangible cultural heritage
• Food and migration
• Urban foodscapes and neighbourhood cultures
• Millennial and Gen Z food cultures
• Platform economies and delivery applications
• Digital food cultures and algorithmic visibility
• Street food economies and informal labour
• Food and gendered domesticity
• Recipes, archives, and intergenerational transmission
• Food, caste, religion, and politics
• Indo-Chinese culinary histories and transformations
• Muslim culinary cultures and Ramadan foodscapes
• Anglo-Indian culinary memory and domestic archives
• Food tourism and heritage commodification
• Culinary nostalgia and sensory memory
• Food in literature, cinema, and visual culture
• Architecture, neighbourhoods, and culinary space
• Food entrepreneurship and changing economies
• Cloud kitchens and digitally mediated consumption
• Food, ecology, and sustainability
• Decolonial and Global South approaches to food studies
• Food as archive, methodology, and cultural practice

Contributors are particularly encouraged to submit theoretically engaged and methodologically rigorous work that moves beyond descriptive accounts of cuisine and critically engages with broader structures of labour, memory, identity, migration, ecology, and representation.

Submission Guidelines
• Abstracts should be approximately 300 words.
• Please include a brief bio-note of approximately 100 words.
• Submissions must clearly indicate the proposed title of the chapter, institutional affiliation, and contact details.
• All abstracts and queries should be sent to: heritagemeetsmodernity@gmail.com

Selected contributors will subsequently be invited to submit full chapters for peer review and editorial consideration.

About the Volume

This edited volume is proposed for publication as part of the Food and Cultures from the Global South series by Peter Lang, an international scholarly series dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary and critical engagements with food across the humanities and social sciences. The series seeks to move beyond reductive narratives of food as a matter of individual taste and instead foreground the social, cultural, historical, political, ecological, and philosophical dimensions of culinary practices, with particular emphasis on perspectives emerging from the Global South. It aims to create an interwoven and multidisciplinary archive that interrogates food as a site of memory, identity, labour, power, mobility, and cultural production.

The present volume is conceived as a contribution to these wider intellectual conversations. Rather than approaching culinary traditions as static or nostalgic cultural inheritances, it invites contributors to examine food as a dynamic social practice situated at the intersection of heritage, urban transformation, migration, community formation, digital mediation, environmental change, and everyday life. Contributors are encouraged to engage with food as an analytical category through diverse methodological and theoretical frameworks, including but not limited to critical heritage studies, memory studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, literary studies, urban studies, migration studies, media studies, sensory studies, gender studies, and political ecology.

The editors particularly welcome original contributions that are theoretically informed, empirically grounded, and attentive to the complexities of the Global South. Essays may address questions of culinary memory, neighbourhood foodscapes, informal economies, platform capitalism, digital food cultures, sustainability, labour, identity, decolonial food practices, and the politics of representation, while remaining attentive to the broader historical and socio-cultural processes through which food is continually produced, negotiated, circulated, and remembered.

For further details about the Food and Cultures from the Global South series and its thematic scope, contributors may consult the series call available here:

Peter Lang Verlag | Food and Cultures from the Global South (https://share.google/xSG555GZUstdSuW9k)
Authors whose abstracts are accepted will receive detailed style guidelines and manuscript preparation instructions. Full chapters should conform to the editorial and formatting requirements prescribed by Peter Lang and will be subject to peer review before final inclusion in the volume.

Tentative Timeline
• Deadline for Abstract Submission: 15th August 2026
• Notification of Acceptance: 30 August 2026
• Full Chapter Submission: 30 November 2026