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175 Nine Global Flows, Local Bodies Dreams of Pakistani Grill in Manhattan Krishnendu Ray A definitive study of immigration proposed by the Committee on International Migration of the Social Science Research Council of the United States, titled Immigration Research for a New Century (Foner, Rumbaut, & Gold 2000), underlines the saliency of race, language, and gender, yet it lists neither the body nor embodiment in its index and section bibliographies.1 Such an omission has greater significance when it persists in the new edition of a self-consciously interdisciplinary and theoretically attuned volume such as Migration Theory (Brettell & Hollifield 2008), where the migrant’s body is once again only indirectly visible and never an object of theoretical attention. Another current instance invokes the missing immigrant body. The September 2009 issue of the Asian Studies Review highlights “Globalization and Body Politics,” drawing attention to “how global processes play out in specific sites” especially at the level of the body (Mackie & Stevens 2009: 257). A final instigation for underscoring the need for theoretical attention to immigrant bodies is the 2011–2012 call for dissertation proposals by the Social Science Research Council of the United States, which contends that “Research on migration and gender has changed considerably since the 1980s,” and yet, it goes on to argue, few scholars of migration have drawn on sophisticated theories of embodiment to investigate processes of movement.2 It is now almost three decades since Bryan S. Turner published The Body and Society (1984), which was one among a number of early sociological texts to pay sustained theoretical attention to the body.3 Turner’s synthesis sought to account for the path-breaking theorizations of Michel Foucault and practices of the social movements of feminism and civil rights that centered on this tactile, tangible thing, the color, texture and gender of the body. Now the 176 • Cities, Middle Classes, Public Cultures field is crowded theoretically,4 yet it is apparent that the sociology of immigration on the one hand, and theories of taste, embodiment, and practice on the other hand, are developing in separate realms. Much of the sociology of the body continues to be devoted to broad theoretical speculation focused on gender, sexuality, and disease, belying the sense that all social action, including immigration, is always embodied.5 I think studies of immigration demand a dose of corporeality, and that theories of embodiment could benefit from a diverse body of empirical research, and that is what I will do in this chapter.6 Immigrant foodways should provide a naturally fecund site to interrogate such an intersection, yet, in the sociology of food we have learned a lot about what customers seek and get in eating ethnic food (typically assumed to be the food of recent and diacritically marked immigrants), which nevertheless summarily dismisses any volition or aspiration on the part of the immigrant producer of food, outside of economic necessity (Johnston &Baumann 2007; Warde & Martens 2000; Warde, Martens, & Olsen 1999). Even when born of economic necessity, there is more to the story of immigrant restaurants than distinction, domination, and deployment of cultural capital. By inserting the habits, memories, work, and dreams of immigrant entrepreneurs into the discussion of taste, this study contributes to a fuller understanding of global flows and modes of localization—bodies are always somewhere, and, as we shall see, they are often trying to make room for themselves in that place. My work focuses on the “ethnic” restaurateur because he or she is the hinge between taste and toil, globalization and localization, two streams of theoretical accounts that could be put in productive conversation with each other. I am interested in the process of designing a restaurant by an immigrant entrepreneur. By design I mean not only the physical infrastructure, but the concept, the menu, and the ways of reproducing it through investment, recruitment of labor, recipes, and cooking. I use the word design because it relates the body to space, economics to aesthetics, habits to consciousness, inhabitance in a locale to global gastronomic discourse. The immigrant body is imprinted with the history of its unconscious habits, made visible and audible by its displacement. An immigrant is an inverted anthropologist, flowing in the wrong direction in the incline of global hierarchies, but with the same advantages of awareness of the tacit dimensions of a practiced body and everyday experience because of the very act of displacement. An accent is nothing but the memory of an old language; posture and gesture a dated hexis; tastes, those of...

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