Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader

Published by New York University Press 2013

Eating Asian America

A Food Studies Reader

Edited by: Robert Ji-Song Ku , Martin F. Manalansan and Anita Mannur

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479818952.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Ku Robert Ji-Song :

Robert Ji-Song Ku is Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University. He is the author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA (2013) and co-editor of Future Yet to Come: Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Modern Korea (2021, with Sonja Kim), Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea (2019, with Sharon Heijin Lee and Monika Mehta), and Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (2013, with Martin Manalansan IV and Anita Mannur)Manalansan Martin F. :

Martin F. Manalansan IV is Associate Professor of anthropology and Asian American studies and Conrad Professorial Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (2003) and co-editor of Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (NYU, 2013).Mannur Anita :

Anita Mannur is Associate Professor of English and Asian /Asian American Studies at Miami University. She is the author of Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture.Robert Ji-Song Ku (Editor)
Robert Ji-Song Ku is Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University. He is the author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA (2013) and co-editor of Future Yet to Come: Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Modern Korea (2021, with Sonja Kim), Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea (2019, with Sharon Heijin Lee and Monika Mehta), and Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (2013, with Martin Manalansan IV and Anita Mannur)

Martin F. Manalansan (Editor)
Martin F. Manalansan IV is Associate Professor of anthropology and Asian American studies and Conrad Professorial Humanities Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (2003) and co-editor of Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (NYU, 2013).

Anita Mannur (Editor)
Anita Mannur is Associate Professor of English and Asian /Asian American Studies at Miami University. She is the author of Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture.

Reviews

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.

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.

[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.

Christopher Patterson:
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.

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials,author of War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work:
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.

Y. Kiuchi:
Featuring 20 essays, this volume connects Asian food to larger social, economic, political, and historical contexts in the US....The essays in this volume not only constitute the first academic book on the topic with such comprehensiveness, but also investigate the social hierarchy that exists around race, gender, sex, class, and ethnicity.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
List of Figures and Maps Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
An Alimentary Introduction Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan and Anita Mannur Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I: Labors of Taste
1. Cambodian Donut Shops and the Negotiation of Identity in Los Angeles Erin M. Curtis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
2. Tasting America The Politics and Pleasures of School Lunch in Hawai‘i Christine R. Yano and Wanda Adams Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	30
3. A Life Cooking for Others The Work and Migration Experiences of a Chinese Restaurant Worker in New York City, 1920–1946 Heather R. Lee Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	53
4. Learning from Los Kogi Angeles: A Taco Truck and Its City Oliver Wang Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	78
5. The Significance of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine in Postcolonial Hawai‘i Samuel Hideo Yamashita Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	98
Part II: Empires of Food
6. Incarceration, Cafeteria Style The Politics of the Mess Hall in the Japanese American Incarceration Heidi Kathleen Kim Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
7. As American as Jackrabbit Adobo Cooking, Eating, and Becoming Filipina/o American before World War II Dawn Bohulano Mabalon Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	147
8. Lechon with Heinz, Lea & Perrins with Adobo The American Relationship with Filipino Food, 1898–1946 René Alexander Orquiza Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
9. “Oriental Cookery” Devouring Asian and Pacific Cuisine during the Cold War Mark Padoongpatt Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	186
10. Gannenshoyu or First-Year Soy Sauce? Kikkoman Soy Sauce and the Corporate Forgetting of the Early Japanese American Consumer Robert Ji-Song Ku Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	208
Part III: Fusion, Diffusion, Confusion?
11. Twenty-First-Century Food Trucks Mobility, Social Media, and Urban Hipness Lok Siu Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
12. Samsa on Sheepshead Bay Tracing Uzbek Foodprints in Southern Brooklyn Zohra Saed Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245
13. Apple Pie and Makizushi Japanese American Women Sustaining Family and Community Valerie J. Matsumoto Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	255
14. Giving Credit Where It Is Due Asian American Farmers and Retailers as Food System Pioneers Nina F. Ichikawa Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	274
15. Beyond Authenticity Rerouting the Filipino Culinary Diaspora Martin F. Manalansan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	288
Part IV: Readable Feasts
16. Acting Asian American, Eating Asian American The Politics of Race and Food in Don Lee’s Wrack and Ruin Jennifer Ho Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	301
17. Devouring Hawai‘i Food, Consumption, and Contemporary Art Margo Machida Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	323
18. “Love Is Not a Bowl of Quinces” Food, Desire, and the Queer Asian Body in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt Denise Cruz Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	354
19. The Globe at the Table How Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian Reconfigures the World Delores B. Phillips Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	371
20. Perfection on a Plate Readings in the South Asian Transnational Queer Kitchen Anita Mannur Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	393
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	409
Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	425
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	431

Language: English
Publisher: New York University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;

eBook

Published: September 23, 2013
ISBN: 9781479818952