Full Description
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.
Contents
List of Figures and Maps Acknowledgments An Alimentary Introduction Part I 1. Cambodian Donut Shops and the Negotiation of Identity in Los Angeles 2. Tasting America 3. A Life Cooking for Others 4. Learning from Los Kogi Angeles 5. The Significance of Hawai'i Regional Cuisine in Postcolonial Hawai'i Part II 6. Incarceration, Cafeteria Style 7. As American as Jackrabbit Adobo 8. Lechon with Heinz, Lea & Perrins with Adobo 9. "Oriental Cookery" 10. Gannenshoyu or First-Year Soy Sauce? Kikkoman Soy Sauce and the Corporate Forgetting of the Early Japanese American ConsumerPart III 11. Twenty-First-Century Food Trucks 12. Samsa on Sheepshead Bay 13. Apple Pie and Makizushi 14. Giving Credit Where It Is Due 15. Beyond AuthenticityPart IV 16. Acting Asian American, Eating Asian American 17. Devouring Hawai'i 18. "Love Is Not a Bowl of Quinces" 19. The Globe at the Table 20. Perfection on a PlateBibliography ContributorsIndex
