As early as 1852, anthropologist Brillat-Savarin asserted, “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are.” With the emergence of food studies as an academic discipline, it has become clear that food is not just an essential ingredient of human survival, it is fundamental to culture, human imagination and creative-aesthetic expression. Food is not just a private concern or a matter of personal taste, it has always been and continues to be a site of social power. This is especially true for Asian Americans. On the one hand, food has been used to racialize and stereotype Asian-Americans. As literary scholar Anita Mannur comments, “Food provides a language through which to imagine Asian alterity in the American imagination.” On the other hand, food has become one of the most important cultural threads of Asian American literature, films and other popular cultural forms, and has gained increasing visibility in the mainstream publishing market and media in recent years.
This class invites students to use food as a lens to study the tightly woven net of everyday life practices associated with food. It treats food as a site of racialization, identity formation, cultural production and consumption, and last but not least, resistance. Through an examination of popular cultural texts such as cookbooks and food shows, food memoirs, emerging genre of food fiction, films and historical novels, we will examine how the tropes of food and eating intersect with the norms of family life, community and nationality, as well as with the discourses of racism, gender, sexuality,Orientalism, internalized colonialism, commodification, and consumption.
