Street-food, class, and memories of masculinity: an exploratory essay in three acts

Abstract

Streets and sidewalks are often read as mere targets of urban development schemes, rarely acknowledged for their importance to various forms of everyday life. Western notions of public space as designed green places of relief from urbanity, or as the imagined public plazas and agoras of civic discussions, are inadequate theoretical frames that cannot account for the sidewalk, the paan-shop, or the tea-stall, as sites of commensality, conviviality, and potential violence. Drawing on personal experience and a range of secondary literature an alternative way of thinking about the streets and re-imagining the national cultural space is proposed —less officious, less bureaucratic, less national—than has been allowed so far in considerations of good taste.

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