A culinary hub in the global city: diasporic Asian foodscapes across Scarborough, Canada

Abstract

This article examines the role of late twentieth-century transnational migrants to Canada in transforming Scarborough into a culinary hub with global and Asian resonances—a place where dense affective, sensory, social, cultural, and economic networks of foodways overlap and combine to create place-specific diasporic sensescapes. The primary research questions are: How does such an Asian culinary hub emerge and function in the transnational and diasporic setting of a contemporary global city and how do citizens’ negotiations of its mobile foodways constitute the hub, and act as its archive? To locate answers for these questions, the authors engaged with long-term collaborative research among academics, students, and community stakeholders connected to the Culinaria Research Centre of the University of Toronto.

Keywords:

• Culinary hub
• ethnoburb
• global city
• migration
• Scarborough
• Toronto
• Asian
• diasporic
• pedagogy
• foodscapes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Digital Scholarship Unit at the University of Toronto Scarborough Library for its help with various digitization projects and student training, especially Lydia Zvyagintseva and Kim Pham. They are grateful to Adrian de Leon and Fateha Hossain of the Culinaria Research Centre, as well as Juneeja Varghese, Wynette Tavares, Raafia Siddiqui, Dania Ansari, Alex Dow, and the resident members of the MANC for their role in facilitating the Culinaria–MANC partnership. They acknowledge the crucial role of the student co-investigators who took part in this research via their participation in the GASD71 classes of 2014-15. A number of Culinaria student projects are available at: http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/culinaria/student-project-showcase.

Notes

1. In 1998, the former City of Toronto was amalgamated with five other neighboring cities, including Scarborough. The term Greater Toronto Area (GTA) refers to the post-amalgamation City of Toronto as well as neighboring cities, and, increasingly, to commuter towns from where many students and workers in Scarborough and Toronto commute on a daily basis.

2. For more information on MANC, see, https://www.facebook.com/Malvern-Action-for-Neighborhood-Change-ANC-261903287255021.

3. Founded in 1976 by the migration and ethnic studies historian Robert F. Harney, the MHSO mandate is to collect, conserve, and chronicle histories of migration and the evolution of ethnicity, especially through oral histories.

4. Transcript of class assignment, available from authors; see also: http://neeela.weebly.com/

5. Transcript of class assignment, available from authors; see also: http://neeela.weebly.com/.

6. The project can be seen here: https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/digitalscholarship/culinaria/mapping-scarborough-chinatown

7. The combined data for the 2015 Fall course can be consulted here: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1Notecgii7ubXM-eSTYrDDmsstb3ZRqFSSUauamD_#rows:id=1

8. See the Full map here: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1iwJksqJ_MLPJNriRGWpvyLyzc60

9. See the full map here: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1gh18hfwHJfPHn2L5GL7ys1Kps4E