What’s Eating Asian American Studies?: Authenticity, Ethnicity, and Cuisine

The plenary panel “Eat, Pray, Puke” at the 2011 Association for Asian American Studies conference concluded with leading Asian American studies scholars Martin Manalansan IV, Anita Mannur, and Robert Ji-Song Ku expressing a palpable sense of fatigue with narratives that present food as a particularly palatable form of engagement with the exotic other. Further, they acknowledged that the mere calling out of the orientalist worldview present in these narratives had run its course as a useful academic strategy. A new tactic was needed. To combat tired and troubling tales that easily slide ethnicity under the sign of culinary taste, these panelists called for scholarly research to look beyond the cliché of intergenerational cultural transmission and to instead approach food as an analytic unit that can tell of social struggle, failure, and recalcitrance. Three recent texts, the Eating Asian America anthology, Ku’s monograph Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA, and Yong Chen’s Chop Suey, USA have arisen to meet this challenge, providing incisive and provocative studies of authenticity, ethnicity, and cuisine.

Eating Asian America is a critical collection that examines how ethnicity is developed through the intertwined history of Asian American bodies and culinary practices. Edited and assembled by Manalansan, Mannur, and Ku, the book transforms the study of Asian American food from an idiosyncratic, crowd-pleasing set of narratives that map discrete social histories into a key subfield for the discipline. Much as Lisa Lowe’s heralded Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics identified immigration as central in the formation of Asian American subjects, Manalansan, Mannur, and Ku focus their book on how “social, political, economic, and historical forces, as well as power inequalities … have circumscribed Asians materially and symbolically in the alimentary realm, forcing them into indentured agricultural work and lifetimes spent in restaurants” (1). By demonstrating how material alimentary histories cut across different Asian American groups, the editors show that the ethnic structures produced through culinary labor and eating practices have consistently delineated Asian American experience and expression throughout their history.

Covering a variety of academic approaches and an array of ethnic communities, the cumulative weight of the studies in this collection affirm the central role that farms, restaurants, and doughnut shops have played and continue to play in shaping the lives of all Asian American subjects. The book contains a number of essays about groups traditionally underrepresented in Asian American studies, like Filipina/o Americans, Hawaiians, and South, Southeast, and Central Asian Americans. Many of the essays serve as important touchstones for multiple fields, such as Heather Lee’s archival study of a 1930s Chinese American restaurant worker in New York, Denise Cruz’s examination of the intersecting representational limits of literature and cuisine, and Lok Siu’s anthropological analysis of Asian American food trucks, social media, and urban hipness.

The volume is organized into twenty chapters with four sections: labor, empire, fusion, and literary representation. Each section demonstrates, through its own focus, how Asian American culinary contacts influence the American sociopolitical landscape.

For instance, the empire section unites around a central question, namely, how does the discursive construction of “authentic” Asian cuisine materially influence intercultural interaction in the United States? Mark Padoongpatt’s “‘Oriental Cookery’: Devouring Asian and Pacific Cuisine during the Cold War” engages this question by arguing that white American women’s interest in Asia and Asian cuisine during the 1950s to 1970s transfigured the US imperial imaginary and suburban whiteness. In the chapter, Padoongpatt traces how a select group of women, who were often the wives of military...