Virtually all North American border foodways literature focuses on the U.S. Southwest. What do we learn however when we study an international boundary running through what is an ethnic minority on both sides of the divide, such as the Arab community that exists on both sides of the Windsor/Detroit border? When a foodway already struggles to find its identity within a hegemonic culture, how does that food community negotiate an international state difference right in its midst? It would appear that, before 9/11, a “soft” border allowed for the existence of a large, interactive, regional cross-border Arab foodway. Since then, the thickening of that border has rapidly accelerated the formation of an “Arab Canadian” foodway in Windsor. After briefly laying out the history of the Windsor/Detroit borderland and then the arrival and steady evolution of Arab communities on both sides of the border, this talk will focus on the catastrophic fissure brought about by 9/11 and how the smaller Windsor community has evolved to deal with this rupture.
Robert L. Nelson is Head of the Department of History at the University of Windsor, Canada. A specialist in the emerging field of ‘food history’, he has recently published ‘Pitas and Passports: Arab Foodways in the Windsor-Detroit Borderlands’ Mashriq & Mahjar 6:2 (2019), as well as ‘Blood and Honey: Culinary Nationalism and Yugonostalgia in a Canadian City’ Global Food History 8: 56-77 (2022) with Amanda Skocic. He is currently completing the manuscript to Global Food History in Seven Dinner Parties, under contract with Biblioasis. Nelson has won fellowships from the Killam Trust, the Humboldt Foundation, and was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. He has also been awarded the University of Windsor’s highest honors in both teaching and research, the Alumni Award for Distinguished Contributions to University Teaching and the UWindsor Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity.