Wassan Ali
My work engages with intersectional archival materials, and I’ve contributed to the essay collections Nicht die Ersten and Reading Roses in Constellation. At Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, I’m affiliated with the research project Queer Theory in Transit, in which I examine queerness in lesbian magazines. I picked the pretzel as the “food” of heterotopia—kind of a meal, but not really, tasty but not quite, and appearing in atypical spaces. In short, the pretzel resonates with “States of Exile,” the section for which I serve as regional editor—comprising Palestinian and Armenian histories, alongside my own writing on Kurdish Berlin.
Selma Siew Li Bidlingmaier
is a scholar of North American cultural studies specializing in urban history, eugenics/euthenics, postcolonial ecocriticism, and inter-Asian entanglements. Her research examines how urban and environmental spaces are produced, colonized, and contested, while highlighting everyday decolonial practices of resistance. Her work spans New York City, Berlin, Singapore, and the Celebes Sea, recovering narratives erased by colonialism and dispossession. Currently a guest professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s North American Studies department, she is also a passionate scuba diver and food scholar.
Julianne Chua
is an artist, writer and researcher with an interest in transversal affinities across diasporas. She co-leads the project Forms of Belonging: The Making and Unmaking of Transnational Identities Across Afro-Asian Diasporas in Berlin. Her work has been published in Afterglobe, Petua: Reminiscing Grandmother Tales and Superstitions, Kepulauan, Inheritance: An Anthology, The Posthumanist and Soy & Zine, presented at Kunstraum Potsdamer Straße, Universität der Künste, CTM Festival and University of Oxford, and performed at NYU Abu Dhabi, Tasarım Bakkalı and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. She is the founder and co-host of Mutfak on Refuge Worldwide and Oroko Radio.
Razak Khan
is a historian affiliated with Freie Universität Berlin. Since 2015, he has been working with the Modern India in German Archives (MIDA) project and has published extensively on the archives and histories of South Asian Muslims in interwar and postwar Germany in the twentieth century. Hosting a multicultural Eid celebration in Görlitzer Park in 2019 provided an impetus to understand food as an affective archive and as a history of migration in the making of contemporary Berlinistan. His essay “Kabul Night in Berlin,” published in Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia (2023), documents these histories.
Inter-Asian Berlin Anthology 