Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader

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.

Robert Ji-Song Ku is Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University and the Managing Editor of Foundations and Futures: Asian American and Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA. He is the author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA.

Martin F. Manalansan IV is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He has taught at the University of Minnesota, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, New York University, New School University, and the University of the Philippines. He is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Duke UP:2003). His forthcoming book is entitled “Queer Dwellings: Mess, Mesh, Measure.” He is the president of the Association for Asian American Studies.

Anita Mannur is Director of the Asia, Pacific, and Diaspora Studies Program and Professor of Critical Race, Gender and Culture Studies at American University. She is the author of Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures and Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Cultures. She is the 2019 recipient of the Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.