Reimagining Foodscapes: On sociality and memory-work in Cape Malay Cooking

The paper explores the intersections between food as a repository and archive of memory and connection to the past, the lingering presence of apartheid and the colonial history of slavery in the Cape, and the contemporary sociality of food-making in the context of a Muslim community in Cape Town. Drawing on a genealogy of Cape Malay food history, the paper discusses the ways in which the contemporary making of Cape Malay/Capetonian Muslim foods evoke, ascertain and imagine embodied foodscapes of the past and of the present. The paper is particularly attentive to narratives connecting the present to the presence of the past and the subversive potential of food-making. That is, food as memory-work and edible acts of re-membering, food as offering a site for contestation of the dominant legacies of the past, and food as a powerful aromatic response to histories of erasure, displacement and marginalisation.