• Royce Fellowship
Zachary Ngin
Zachary
Ngin

Concentration 

Modern Culture and Media

Award Year 

2019
Malaysian Food, Diasporic Intimacy, and Nostalgia for Lost Futures

“Food is not only good to eat, it’s good to think with,” wrote Claude Lévi-Strauss. This project uses food to think about diasporic intimacy and nostalgia in the multiethnic, postcolonial nation of Malaysia. Zachary will use an interdisciplinary approach – including photography, interviews, art history, literary criticism, sound recording, and memoir – to ask why food features so prominently in nostalgic accounts of this country. His final multimedia essay will straddle the boundary between engaged scholarship and critical artistic practice, ultimately seeking to model decolonial ways of seeing and creating.

Advisor: Lauren Yapp (Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World)