This semester, I am taking over Musings’ Research Column to share a bit about my personal research and upcoming exhibition project. Ideally, this column will touch upon both the exciting and woeful moments of historical research - from archival photos to tricky translations and many winding paths in-between...and of course, give some insight into a Museum Studies student’s research!
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| A peek into an archival box from the Ontario Jewish Archives. Photo courtesy of Casarina Hocevar. |
Exhibition Project/Research Scope
Last semester, I delved into two intersecting projects. The first is my MMSt exhibition project, Storefront Stories, co-curated with fellow Museum Studies candidates Amy, Evelyn, and Erica, for the Ontario Jewish Archives (OJA). Our project investigates and shares Kensington Market’s Jewish history through the lens of archival storefront photographs. Through the creation of our poster exhibition and website, we aim to explore Jewish life in the Market during the early 20th Century. The exhibition will use the photographs as a springboard into themes about the market’s culture, including intellectual and political life, Jewish foodways, immigration, trade and commerce, and the neighbourhood’s community.
The second project is a historical investigation of Jewish foodways in Kensington Market. This project began with a research proposal for a history course I took last semester, “The History of Food and Drink,” and has since evolved into an ongoing personal project as a way to bolster my knowledge about Kensington Market, (im)migrant foodways, and local Jewish history. (I will also be sharing some of this research at the upcoming McGill-Queen’s Graduate History Conference in March.) Through compiling, reading and interpreting a combination of primary and secondary sources, I have been slowly noting the early foodways of the Market. Primary sources used are those normally accessed at the OJA or City of Toronto Archives, such as photographs, menus, business directories, newspaper clippings, etc. While the secondary sources available come from a range of fields, including Jewish studies, food studies, geography, diaspora studies, and history.
So...why - and what are - foodways?
While Storefront Stories is not an exhibition about Kensington Market’s Jewish foodways per se, my interest and pursuit of foodways research undeniably connects to the exhibition’s broad themes. Food studies (and more specifically for me, food history) aims to understand how food, and food practices, impacts our lives. This can include both our intimate relationships with food (e.g. how we conceptualize our identities and those of others through food practices) to more public and global food topics, such as the role of restaurants in gentrification, or say the commodification and trade of food items - coffee beans, wheat, or bananas.
“Foodways” refers to more specific practices associated with people in a given place and/or period (e.g. Japanese foodways in the 19th Century, or the foodways of British colonists in India, or Palestinian foodways in the diaspora). So, in the context of my research, by focusing upon Jewish foodways in Kensington Market, I can better contextualize a range of information, including: the popularity of certain types of establishments (e.g. kosher delis), the sensory experience of the Market (what would one smell or taste or hear throughout the Market in the early 20th Century?), and, the role of gender in private and public spaces (who prepared, purchased, and served food goods in the neighbourhood?)... all of which helps to better inform us about life in early Kensington Market.
As the semester progresses, keep your eye out for future posts in this series which will highlight some of my research developments!
