Eating Asian America
- Organizer: A/P/A Institute at NYU
- Venue: 19 West 4th Street
- Address:
19 West 4th Street
New York , NY 10003 United States
Co-presented with NYU Press
A collection of burgeoning new scholarship on the study of foodways and culinary practices, Eating Asian America brings into dialogue the proliferation of Cambodian doughnut shops in Los Angeles with the politics of school lunch in Hawai‘i with the history of Kikkoman soy sauce with the rise of the Asian American hipster food trucks and more. In a refusal to yield to the superficial multiculturalism that naively celebrates difference through the pleasures of food and eating, the volume reveals the class, racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender inequalities that pervade and persist in the production, distribution, and consumption of Asian American cuisine.
Editors Robert Ji-Sing Ku, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Anita Mannur and contributors Nina F. Ichikawa, Heidi Kim, and Zohra Saed discuss Eating Asian America with Krishnendu Ray (Chair of the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies & Public Health, NYU Steinhardt) alongside some of the most prominent figures in Asian American food.
RSVP by Tuesday, October 22 using the form below.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies & Public Health at NYU Steinhardt, Institute for Asia & Asian Diasporas and the Department of Asian & Asian American Studies at Binghamton University, Binghamton University Asian & Asian American Alumni Council, and Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, NYU.
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.
Martin F. Manalansan IV is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora.
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.
Nina F. Ichikawa studied food policy at UC Berkeley and Tokyo’s Meiji Gakuin University. Her education also includes working as a restaurant dishwasher, making corsages at her family’s 107-year-old flower shop in California, and helping to establish the nation’s first high school Asian American Studies program. In 2011 she was awarded the IATP Food and Community Fellowship. Her writing has been published in Grist, Civil Eats, Rafu Shimpo, and Hyphen magazine, where she’s also Food & Agriculture Editor.
Heidi Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her essay in Eating Asian America grows out of her extensive research on the Japanese American incarceration, which includes an article on Fred Korematsu published in the Journal of Transatlantic American Studies and an edited book in preparation which includes the unpublished memoir, correspondence, artwork, and photos of the Hoshidas, a Japanese American family from Hawai’i who was incarcerated on the mainland. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Invisible Subjects on the Asian American presence in canonical Cold War literature by authors such as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Ralph Ellison. Other publications include work on Walt Whitman and antislavery literature.
Zohra Saed is a Brooklyn based writer and educator. She is co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press).