Chinese Food Abroad
Wednesday 14 May 2025, 10am – 11am BST
Online, Registration Required
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Joita Das, ‘Cha, Chini, Cheena Bazaar: Food and Fusion in the Making of the Indian-Chinese Community of Calcutta’
The overseas Chinese of India (‘Indian-Chinese’) share the same historical trajectory as their Southeast Asian counterparts, having come and settled down in Calcutta between the 18th and 20th centuries. Yet literature on their food and culinary practices is scarce. This presentation will examine the ways in which Chinese food in India celebrates the small, Indian-Chinese community’s history of migration and settlement in Calcutta. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted over the past year with Indian-Chinese chefs and restaurant and business owners, it examines how processes of localization—including the incorporation of indigenous ingredients and cooking techniques—enabled migrants to reinvent their food and culinary practices in a foreign land. By focusing on moments of hybridity and culinary fusion, this presentation explores how food helped orient early Chinese migrants in India towards both their home and host societies through space and continues to do so through time.
Joita Das is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Asian Studies program at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She is the recipient of the NUS Research Scholarship. She completed her B.A. Honours from the Azim Premji University, Bangalore and her M.A. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar where she was awarded the President’s Gold Medal and the Institute Gold Medal. Her doctoral research explores trends in Chinese migratory history in Asia within the larger framework of Inter-Asia Studies and connected histories, with a special focus on the Indian-Chinese community of Calcutta.
Nan Xiang, ‘How Dublin’s Novel Chinese Restaurants Pursue Distinction’
Chinese restaurants are everywhere in Ireland, but we rarely talk about their place in Irish food culture. My research on Irish Chinese restaurants began with an examination of a phenomenon: in recent decades, a few restaurants have shed the cheap image of ethnic cuisine and achieved a higher status in the Irish culinary prestige hierarchy. This new type of restaurants renders the category of ethnic cuisine problematic. Framing the restaurant world as a field of cultural production, I conceptualize this shift as agents accumulating cultural capital to improve their field position. I argue that cultural capital is not merely the legitimate taste of the dominant class, but the techniques and consciousness embodied by individuals and objectified in their practice. This perspective can challenge static notions of cuisine and ethnicity and highlight the subjectivity of restaurateurs and chefs that goes beyond the structuring effect of habitus.
Nan Xiang has a background in historical geography and worked as a book editor before joining in the food studies community. Last October, he earned his master’s degree in Gastronomy and Food Studies from Technological University Dublin, where he completed a project on the upward mobility of Chinese restaurants in Dublin. He is now doing archival research on Ireland’s Chinese restaurants. This September, he will begin his PhD program, which will use more ethnographic methods to explore the intersection of food, migration, and identity.
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