AADS Brown Bag: Devouring the Inscrutable: Eating Asians and the Politics of Enfleshment

POSTPONED: Date has been changed from September 30 to October 21

When: Friday, October 21, 12-1pm EST
Where: Pink Parlor, East Duke Building 
 

This talk juxtaposes and contextualizes the phenomenon of Asian “eating” content (such as popular Korean “eating broadcasts” or Mukbang videos, Asian diasporic food writing, and daily eating vlogs) alongside the historic figure of the “starving/hungry” Asian, a lingering trope from mid-twentieth century famine rhetoric and nutritional literature. By analyzing literary, visual, and performance archives, I argue that for Asian/American and diasporic subjects, food and eating become mediums through which bodies that are otherwise inscribed as mechanical, surplus, or inscrutable are able to find expressive modes for feelings of love, regret, forgiveness, and sympathy. As these affectively imbued biological processes of feeding, eating, and digesting come to mediate complex, intergenerational feelings, food and the Asiatic body have also been mobilized in the imperial American repertoire as a site of incongruity and terror. Thinking through the scalar and lingering affects of the stomach, this talk asks us to consider: how does Asiatic flesh travel and adhere through points of contact with its own biological processes–of weight-gain and loss, hunger and fullness, illness and aging?

Registration info will be provided once we have the details for the rescheduled Brown Bag lecture finalized. Be on the lookout!