Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader
Robert Ji-Song Ku
Examines the ways our conceptions of Asian American food have been shaped
Chop suey. Sushi. Curry. Adobo. Kimchi. The deep associations Asians in the United States have with food have become ingrained in the American popular imagination. So much so that contentious notions of ethnic authenticity and authority are marked by and argued around images and ideas of food.
Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader collects burgeoning new scholarship in Asian American Studies that centers the study of foodways and culinary practices in our understanding of the racialized underpinnings of Asian Americanness. It does so by bringing together twenty scholars from across the disciplinary spectrum to inaugurate a new turn in food studies: the refusal to yield to a superficial multiculturalism that naively celebrates difference and reconciliation through the pleasures of food and eating. By focusing on multi-sited struggles across various spaces and times, the contributors to this anthology bring into focus the potent forces of class, racial, ethnic, sexual and gender inequalities that pervade and persist in the production of Asian American culinary and alimentary practices, ideas, and images.
This is the first collection to consider the fraught itineraries of Asian American immigrant histories and how they are inscribed in the production and dissemination of ideas about Asian American foodways.
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About Robert Ji-Song Ku
Reviews for Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader
Y. Kiuchi
CHOICE
"Full of provocation and insight, this collection productively investigates the complicated and often racialized relationships between consumer, producer, and nation. Foundational in its interdisciplinary, transnational critique of cuisine-driven multiculturalism, Eating Asian Americaskillfully navigates the vexed terrain of food politics."
Cathy J. Schlund-Vials,author of War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work "The essays themselves are readable and concise. Each scholar... [is] successful in reaching a very large audience, from Asian American scholars to those simply interested in food histories and identities."
Christopher Patterson
The International Examiner
"[Manalansan] coedits the interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the ways in which eating and culinary practices reflect and reinforce class, racial, and gender inequalities among Asian-American immigrants."
Rochester Review
"Eating Asian Americadoes an excellent job of introducing the Asian/Asian American perspective to the discipline of food studies. This book is a highly useful, and much needed addition to food studies. It is a significant addition to the growing conversation about American foodways; as such, it is important that this booknot be considered to explore a niche topic."
Graduate Journal of Food Studies
"Thisbook transforms the study of Asian American food from an idiosyncratic, crowd-pleasing set of narratives that map discrete social histories into a key subfield for the discipline."
American Quarterly