There is a rise in events connecting people to food, the sources of food, and the materiality of food––including all its affective and sensorial qualities. We have found that this not only translates into food politics but into a wide array of power dynamics surrounding food that connect our past to our imagined/desired futures, especially as we engage with conversations that become nodes that facilitate connections across cultures. The connection lies beyond the ingredients but in the affective agency within them and their relationship to each other. We focus on how we connect through the ingredients, how we measure them, and how they exist in relation to one another, as ingredients strengthen the affective connection with food materiality, as we feel the textures and tastes in order to know if you put the right quantity. Our proposal is a provocation of how transnational creative practices are produced and translated through a cocreated recipe whereby talking through a common recipe (and how that recipe came to be) we disclose and imagine glocal similarities between Mexican food and Palestinian food.
Articles by Sulafa Zidani
Sulafa Zidani is a writer, speaker, and educator at Northwestern University, where she is an Assistant Professor in Communication Studies. As a critical global internet studies scholar, she researches civic engagement and online creative practices across languages. Her work has been informed by her proficiency in Mandarin, English, Arabic, Hebrew, and French. She is currently working on her first book project called All Your Meme Are Belong To Us: Internet Cultures in the Global South about how meme creators navigate transnational politics on the multilingual internet. Her research has appeared in venues such as Social Media + Society, International Journal of Communication, and Asian Communication Research. She is a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology The Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics and Resistance Online.