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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the cultural and social role of food practices and habits in the re-affirmation of migrants' identities with particular reference to the sub-Saharan African communities in the city of Naples, investigating the multifaceted dynamics of inclusion/exclusion related to food.

Paper long abstract:

My presentation aims at investigating the role of food practices and habits in the processes of construction of migrants' subjectivity and sociality. I will present preliminary results of my fieldwork in the city of Naples, in Southern Italy, where I am conducting ethnographic research among some sub-Saharan African communities.

From the hawkers' selling of African street food to the "traditional" food dishes offered by the African restaurants, food appears to be one of the crucial elements in the process of (re)affirmation of individual and collective identities. It contributes to create the idea and the sense of community for several reasons: from the "multisensory" redefinition of the urban space that migrants' food practices allow to the creation of places of food consumption and sharing. These last are spaces that strongly contribute to migrants' homemaking process. Although food can be a source of inclusion for migrants, since it fosters relations among them, it can also determine (self)exclusion, towards and within the host country but also among different migrants' communities (Abbots 2016). Finally, in a gendered perspective, migrants' food acts as a powerful instrument for women's sense of self-recognition in the new environment, in private (domestic) as well as in public space. Through food, women largely contribute in their family economy while their role as "upholders of traditional culture" is reproduced and reaffirmed through it, allowing, in the meantime, the creation of a larger sense of family and, in a greatest perspective, of community.