Culinary Fictions

An exploration of how and why food matters in the culture and literature of the South Asian diaspora.

For South Asians, food regularly plays a role in how issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and national identity are imagined as well as how notions of belonging are affirmed or resisted. Culinary Fictions provides food for thought as it considers the metaphors literature, film, and TV shows use to describe Indians abroad. When an immigrant mother in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake combines Rice Krispies, Planters peanuts, onions, salt, lemon juice, and green chili peppers to create a dish similar to one found on Calcutta sidewalks, it evokes not only the character’s Americanization, but also her nostalgia for India. Food, Anita Mannur writes, is a central part of the cultural imagination of diasporic populations, and Culinary Fictions maps how it figures in various expressive forms. Mannur examines the cultural production from the Anglo-American reaches of the South Asian diaspora. Using texts from novels—Chitra Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night—and cookbooks such as Madhur Jaffrey’s Invitation to Indian Cooking and Padma Lakshmi’s Easy Exotic, she illustrates how national identities are consolidated in culinary terms.

Recipes from Feast of Fiction, the innovative YouTube show featuring fantastical and fictional recipes inspired by books, movies, comics, video games, and more. Fans of Feast of Fiction have been clamoring for a cookbook since the channel debuted in 2011. Now it’s here! Just as they do on the small screen, hosts Jimmy Wong and Ashley Adams whip up their real-life interpretation of fictional dishes to pay homage in a genuine, geeky, and lively way. Jimmy brings a wealth of gamer and nerd cred to the table, and baker extraordinaire Ashley provides the culinary wisdom. The quirky duo offer an array of creative and simple recipes, featuring dishes inspired by favorites such as Star Trek and Adventure Time, as well as Butterbeer (Harry Potter), A Hobbit’s Second Breakfast, Mini “Dehydrated” Pizzas (Back to the Future), Sansa’s Lemon Cakes (Game of Thrones), and dishes from the niches of gaming, comics, and animation such as Fire Flakes (Avatar), Poke Puffs (Pokemon), and Heart Potions (The Legend of Zelda). With 55 unique and awesome dishes, this long-awaited cookbook will help inspire a pop culture dinner party, a fun night at home with family and friends, or an evening on the couch thinking about what you could be cooking!

Contributions by Hena Ahmad, Linda Pierce Allen, Mary J. Henderson Couzelis, Sarah Park Dahlen, Lan Dong, Tomo Hattori, Jennifer Ho, Ymitri Mathison, Leah Milne, Joy Takako Taylor, and Traise Yamamoto Often referred to as the model minority, Asian American children and adolescents feel pressured to perform academically and be disinterested in sports, with the exception of martial arts. Boys are often stereotyped as physically unattractive nerds and girls as petite and beautiful. Many Americans remain unaware of the diversity of ethnicities and races the term Asian American comprises, with Asian American adolescents proving to be more invisible than adults. As a result, Asian American adolescents are continually searching for their identity and own place in American society. For these kids, being or considered to be American becomes a challenge in itself as they assert their Asian and American identities; claim their own ethnic identity, be they immigrant or American-born; and negotiate their ethnic communities. The contributors to Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction focus on moving beyond stereotypes to examine how Asian American children and adolescents define their unique identities. Chapters focus on primary texts from many ethnicities, such as Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Japanese, Vietnamese, South Asian, and Hawaiian. Individual chapters, crossing cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries, negotiate the complex terrain of Asian American children's and teenagers" identities. Chapters cover such topics as internalized racism and self-loathing; hyper-sexualization of Asian American females in graphic novels; interracial friendships; transnational adoptions and birth searches; food as a means of assimilation and resistance; commodity racism and the tourist gaze; the hostile and alienating environment generated by the War on Terror; and many other topics.

This book focuses on the fiction of four postcolonial authors: V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Timothy Mo and Salman Rushdie. It argues that meals in their novels act as sites where the relationships between the individual subject and the social identities of race, class and gender are enacted. Drawing upon a variety of academic fields and disciplines — including postcolonial theory, historical research, food studies and recent attempts to rethink the concept of world literature — it dedicates a chapter to each author, tracing the literary, cultural and historical contexts in which their texts are located and exploring the ways in which food and the act of eating acquire meanings and how those meanings might clash, collide and be disputed. Not only does this book offer suggestive new readings of the work of its four key authors, but it challenges the reader to consider the significance of food in postcolonial fiction more generally.

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.

This book is concerned with food autobiographies written by men from the 1980s to the present. It concentrates on how food has transformed autobiographical narratives and how these define the ways men eat and cook nowadays. After presenting a historical overview of the place of food within men ́s autobiography, this volume analyzes the reasons for our present interest in food and the proliferation of life narratives focused on cooking. Then it centers around the identities that male chefs are taking on in the writing of their lives and the generic models they use: the heroic, the criminal and the hunting autobiographical scripts. This study gives evidence that autobiographies are crucial in the redefinition of the new masculinities emerging in the kitchen. It will appeal to readers interested in Food Studies, Autobiographical Studies, Men's Studies and American Literature and Culture.

Tracing a literary lineage for works from different genres, it identifies key trends in recent South Asian American and British Asian literature by considering the favoured formal and aesthetic modes of major writers and by relating their work to differen