Situating Temporal Landscapes of Transnational Migrant Food Cultures

The sensations of migration shape a multiplied form of temporality among expatriate communities living outside their familiar cultural heritage contexts. In this paper we focus on the temporality not spatiality of cuisine cultures. We include globalising foodstuffs and eating experiences as well as the transnational local, that is the authentic and mundane everyday eating that migrants bring from their homes to a destination. Deploying an original theoretical framework based on concepts of Bourdieu, Simmel, Appadurai, Bachelard and Lefebvre, the paper analyses the temporal landscapes of transnational migrant food cultures among high skill professionals in globalising Ho Chi Minh City. Besides Vietnamese migrants from across the nation’s diverse regions, Vietnam’s largest city accommodates dynamic expatriate communities from across the globe, particularly peoples who speak and eat in Korean, French, Arabic, Tamil, and Portuguese. Drawing on interviews and online content analysis with community members and associational networks, we explore examples such as eating winter street foods like Korean tteokbokki year round at restaurant tables, preparing home style stapes like Middle Eastern hommus for a multicultural restaurant clientele, French quail eggs, Vietnamese 100-year-old eggs, and other pickled, fermented, dried, frozen and fresh produce as cultural objects that are experienced as sensations of temporality that simultaneously satisfy a nostalgic pull and a disrupted palate. We reconsider how sensory cultural heritage and hybridity operate in a temporal landscape interpreted as an unsettled multiplicity and ask how globalisations reshape understandings of temporality through situated everyday practices. We conclude to what extent sensory studies offers a novel approach for analysing intercultural communication, cross-cultural understanding and multiculturalism in globalising cities. The paper contributes to studies of time and sustainable urban development by broadening the previously dominant focus on spatial issues to also consider temporality, an area we contend is under-researched in studies on the senses and the city.