We are inviting abstracts of papers on “Culinary Crossovers: Authenticity and Ambiguity in Reimagining Food Heritage in South Asia”, to be published in a special issue for the Journal of Food, Culture & Society (Taylor and Francis, Scopus Q1). In this special issue, we aim to probe into culinary histories and practices as appended to cultural/collective memory, where the idealised and marketable concept of “authenticity” emerges as a “palimpsest” conditioned by competing ideologies of nostalgia and privilege afforded by the ability to relocate. A close reading of such representations and narrative traces of culinary histories shows a nostalgic longing, mediated by the idea of a static or unchanging past that can be “consumed” and “performed” by reappropriating past cultures of consumption. 

This special issue argues for a critical reinterpretation of the conceptual categories of “authenticity” and “ambiguity” as essential determinants of the culinary experience and dietary traditions. By doing so, it seeks to bring into conversation the articulations of marginalised identities through alternate food histories in South Asia that were written off, stigmatised, or localised. Thereby, it exposes the essentialism inherent in heritage-making and its underlying hierarchies of class, gender, and caste privileges. Furthermore, it argues how heritage is shaped by and, in turn, shapes the performance of community memory, which is constantly reconfigured amidst unavoidable global and local influences. The issue, thus, explores literary and cultural readings of trans-spatial and transoceanic foodways that connect food heritage to broader narratives of food sovereignty, scarcity,  adaptability, and resilience. Simultaneously, it seeks to understand how dominant culinary narratives are controlled by those having institutional access, along with the “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai, 2004) and navigate systems. Fundamental to our inquiry lies the compelling question: How is heritage framed and packaged in popular discourse? How is it made, unmade, and remade through gastronomic practices, particularly when identity is shaped by movement, memory, and cultural hybridity? Collectively, the contributions intervene and excavate the predominant culinary signifiers or the standardised representations that constitute South Asia as a cohesive, cultural entity. Instead, the issue reveals how heritage-making is a selective process that activates certain traditions, practices, or even ingredients to become representative of national or regional identity by foregrounding the internal disparities through the fractured, contested, and often ambiguous histories braided into the food practices. Addressing these in relation to food materialities, this special issue contextualises culinary narratives of care, commensality, and resilience within the complex cultural cross-currents of the foodscapes in South Asia. Apart from these defining influences of plenitude and diversity, this issue also takes into account episodes of chronic hunger. In South Asia, hunger has been tied to deprivation, colonial extraction, and systemic inequality, constituting a “difficult heritage”(Macdonald; 2008), in which the past that “is recognised as meaningful in the present…is also contested and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirming contemporary identity” (Macdonald 1). It unsettles the nostalgic framework or the celebratory narratives of abundance in heritagisation of food that cauterise culinary memory by effacing dark histories of scarcity, poverty,  famine, or displacement, which left their lasting legacy in the present. 

The issue taps into the manifold manifestations of culinary heritage within the larger discourse of heritagisation, mobility, and South Asian identity to find them not only in the public performance of memory and acts of memorialisation but also in intimate quotidian practices and gendered labours in the kitchen. It equally calls attention to the multifarious accounts of dislocation, exclusion, and migration in heritage-making to ruffle the neat idea of heritage as fixed or rooted in a geographical location. The interventions assert that heritage here is constituted by movements, disruptions, and ruptures in regional culinary narratives as by inheritance and continuity.

We welcome submissions on themes including, but not limited to, the following:

• Authenticity,  ambiguity, and essentialism in South Asian food histories 

• Colonial and transoceanic foodways

• Culinary memories, diaspora, and cultural crossovers

• Postcolonial and anti-colonial resilience in local food cultures

• Food, nostalgia and commensal networks in heritage-making

• Food, caste, and modalities of exclusion

• Dalit cuisine: its variations and representations in mainstream culinary narratives

• Hunger and the political ecology of food

• Food, heritage, and embodied knowledge

• Gastroimperialism and the transformation of culinary histories in the Global South

• Food, mobility, and privilege

Interested participants should submit an abstract of approximately 300 words to 

culinarycrossovers@gmail.com by June 25, 2025. 

Issue Editors:

Dr Anuparna Mukherjee (Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IISER Bhopal), Srijita Biswas (PhD Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IISER Bhopal), and Dr Arunima Bhattacharya (Lecturer in English, Edinburgh Napier University)