How is the meaning of food created, communicated, and continually transformed? How are food practices defined, shaped, delineated, constructed, modified, resisted, and reinvented – by whom and for whom? These are but a few of the questions Who Decides? Competing Narratives in Constructing Tastes, Consumption and Choice explores. Part I (Taste, Authenticity & Identity) explicitly centres on the connection between food and identity construction. Part II (Food Discourses) focuses on how food-related language shapes perceptions that in turn construct particular behaviours that in turn demonstrate underlying value systems. Thus, as a collection, this volume explores how tastes are shaped, formed, delineated and acted upon by normalising socio-cultural processes, and, in some instances, how those very processes are actively resisted and renegotiated.
Contributors are Shamsul AB, Elyse Bouvier, Giovanna Costantini, Filip Degreef, Lis Furlani Blanco, Maria Clara de Moraes Prata Gaspar, Marta Nadales Ruiz, Nina Namaste, Eric Olmedo, Hannah Petertil, Maria José Pires, Lisa Schubert, Brigitte Sébastia, Keiko Tanaka, Preetha Thomas, Andrea Wenzel, Ariel Weygandt, Andrea Whittaker and Minette Yao.
Author Biography:
Nina B. Namaste, Ph.D. (2005, Indiana University), is Associate Professor of Spanish at Elon University. Her core disciplinary research and publications focus on food-related imagery as a means to express issues of race, class, and gender identity formation.
Marta Nadales Ruiz, Ph.D. (2008, Complutense University of Madrid), is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at that university. Her core disciplinary research focuses on the discursive construction of cultural identity in 19th century Spanish and British non-fictional works.
