IMBISS: A Working Group - Episode 8: al-Andalus

The eighth and final session of “IMBISS: A Working Group”, led by Pablo Giménez Arteaga, Lúa Pérez, and Hannah O’Flynn, will explore the culinary history of al-Andalus. This session will take the form of a dinner that brings together dishes from both the Muslim and Sephardic Jewish culinary traditions of al-Andalus. With it, we will open up the history of the Catholic Crown’s Inquisition, and examine how the persecution and expulsion of Muslim and Jewish populations can be traced through changes in culinary traditions, as well as the construction of the so-called “traditional Spanish diet”. The collection of dishes featured in this session will also illuminate the significant impact of colonisation on the contemporary Spanish diet, revealing how its culinary identity has been shaped by a history of brutal colonisation as well as the demonisation and persecution of Muslim and Jewish traditions.

Saturday 14th December at 7pm

IMBISS: A Working Group

“IMBISS: a working group” is a series of study groups, workshops and performances around the kitchen table that think food as that which is simultaneously life sustenance, a cultural ecosystem and a political product. Its curriculum looks at the intersections between eating practices, culinary histories, food production and trade, and global politics.

Each of the series’ sessions will focus on a different food item or practice and open up its political history. They will be looking at how these intersect with colonial histories, global capitalist trade routes, processes of racialisation, gender politics, economic uneven development, histories of revolutionary organising, and others.

This project is being developed with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.