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The Gastropoetics of Asian/America: A Critical Food Studies Symposium

Dates: Thursday and Friday, February 16-17 
Location: TBD

 
Hosted by the Asian American and Diaspora Studies program at Duke University, this two-day hybrid symposium interrogates how forms of racial and gendered intimacies are mediated through food and eating cultures. Postcolonial feminist scholar Parama Roy theorized "gastropoetics" as an analytic for how food and eating map a sensorial experience of history, place, and colonial ordering alongside ways diasporic and migrant communities engage in their own sense-making. The Gastropoetics of Asian/America symposium turns to the visceral and mundane to ask: how does Asian/America make, break, and find itself through appetites and food storying? How do Asian/American and diasporic reflections on food, eating, and feeding illuminate the historical and contemporary formations of migration, war, and empire? What new or forgotten sensations might we uncover when engaging with Asian/American and diasporic food production, consumption, and eating practices? 

The event will feature lectures and workshops from guest speakers Anita Mannur, Mark Padoongpatt, and Margaret Rhee. Join us for delicious food and conversation!

Contact: Athia Choudhury, athia.choudhury@duke.edu
Lecture and Q&A with Elaine Hsieh Chou

Date: Friday, March 24 
Location: Ruby Lounge

 
Join us for a talk and Q&A session with acclaimed Taiwanese American novelist Elaine Hsieh Chou, author of Disorientation.

Contact: AADS Staff, dukeaasp@duke.edu
Looking Back at Fall 2022

Recap of AADS Fall 2022 Events
 
Duke’s Asian American and Diaspora Studies Program kicked off the fall semester in 2022 with the Southeast Conference on Asian American Studies—the first gathering in the U.S. Southeast dedicated to bringing scholars of Asian American Studies together. Duke hosted the event with the University of North Carolina’s Asian American Center. The conference program consisted of several panels to allow students and faculty to engage with issues related to “researching, teaching, studying, and growing Asian American studies” in the U.S. Southeast. The conference was a huge success and featured Dr. Sylvia Chong of the University of Virginia as the keynote speaker. 
 
In October, AADS co-sponsored the Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professorship Lecture by Dr. Pawan Dhingra, Associate Provost and Professor of American Studies at Amherst College. His lecture titled “Let’s Not Celebrate Asian Americans, Let’s Fight for Them” addressed the recent rise in anti-Asian violence and how it is deeply rooted in U.S. history. The lecture was part of the Keohane Professorship which brings prominent faculty to serve as visiting professors at UNC and Duke for a one-year period, during which they deliver a lecture series and engage students and faculty around areas of shared interest to both institutions.
 
AADS collaborated extensively with other units during the semester, and highlights include the screening of CHOSEN—a documentary on five Korean American congressional candidates—and the co-sponsorship of the New Day Films screenings of documentaries and short films, including Far East, Deep South and Cruisin’ J-Town. AADS also co-sponsored public talks by Dr. Nancy Yunhwa Rao of Rutgers University on the early Chinese theater in the U.S., Dr. Quinn Wang on her health startup, and Dr. Eileen Chow, Professor Torry Bend, and Dr. Jules Odendahl-James on the making of Qui Nguyen’s She Kills Monsters, which was the fall Main Stage show produced by the Department of Theater Studies.
 
A key event organized by AADS faculty was part of the Minor Aesthetics Faculty Working Group—an intellectual hub convened by Dr. Anna Storti and Dr. Yun Emily Wang for scholars and artists working at the intersection of aesthetic inquiry, queer studies, and the Asian diaspora. AADS co-sponsored the two-day Minor Aesthetics Symposium, which included an AADS Brown Bag event on October 12 that featured the artists Chanel Matsunami Govreau & Jae Quisol.
 
The last Brown Bag of the semester showcased AADS Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Athia Choudhury who gave a hybrid talk titled “Devouring the Inscrutable: Eating Asians and the Politics of Enfleshment” on the politics of eating in the Asian diaspora on October 21. November opened with a AADS Speaker Series event featuring Dr. Russell M. Jeung, Professor at San Francisco State University and a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, who gave a talk titled “Be Like Water: Combatting Anti-AAPI Hate.” On November 7, AADS closed out the semester with an Open House at the Rubenstein Arts Center where students and faculty joined for dinner to learn more about the AADS Program.


Written by: Sanjit Beriwal, AADS Undergraduate Student Staff

Minor Aesthetics: A Recap
 
In a contemporary moment marked by the criss-crossing pressures of neoliberalism, racism, fascism, cis- and homonationalism, the Minor Aesthetics symposium carved out space to forge and reflect on new conceptions of the boundaries of life, the politics of queerness, and the contours of community. “Minor Aesthetics: Queer, Asian, Diasporic” began as a working group co-convened by Dr. Anna Storti (GSF, AADS) and Dr. Emily Yun Wang (Music, AADS) at the beginning of last spring. The working group began at the idea – the hope – that art can give us new ways to explode open and articulate racialized queer life, that we can find new ways of thinking through art, beyond or together with common conceptions of academia. What does liberation look like for the queer, the Asian, and how do we explore the question – or perhaps more aptly, challenge stable concepts of the “queer” or “Asian” – through the lens of the aesthetic? 
 
The symposium, which occurred October 12-13, 2022 featured two artists-in-residence, Chanel Matsunami Govreau and Jae Quisol. Their multimedia performance wove together a catharsis of spoken word, sculpture, music, and movement, towards an examination of death’s (im)permanence, sensorial futures, and the formation of communities around embodied, contradictory notions of queerness (at least that’s what I left their performance thinking about). Through an AADS brown bag, artist talks, a working group showcase, and a closing roundtable, the rest of the symposium continued to examine overlapping questions of the role that the aesthetic plays in figuring the racialized, sexualized, and gendered body. 

Written by: AADS Undergraduate Student Staff
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