Palates of Pleasure: Food, Memories and Culture

Rozena Maart was born in District Six, the old slave quarter of Cape Town, South Africa. She has Bengali, Javanese and Indigenous Xhosa heritage. She loves food and loves cooking as do both sides of her family. She is also a mother and two years ago became a grandmother. She is the winner of “The Journey Prize: Best Short Fiction in Canada, 1992,” and two lifetime achievement awards in philosophy and literature, a Mercator Fellow at the University of Bremen for the Contradiction Studies programme and a Research Ambassador. She is a Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, where she is the South African Research Chair on The National Question and Chair of The National Question Network.

Sayan Dey is Bengali and was raised in Kolkata. Currently, he works as an Assistant Professor at Bayan College in Oman. He is also an Associate Fellow at the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University, Canada, a Critical Research Studies Faculty at The NYI Institute of Cultural, Cognitive and Linguistic Studies, New York, and an Affiliated Member of the Global Posthuman Network. His latest monographs are Green Academia: Towards Eco-friendly Education Systems (Routledge, 2022), Performing Memories, Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean (Anthem Press, 2023), and Garbocracy: Towards a Great Human Collapse (Peter Lang, 2025).