Class Detail

Focuses on a particular topic in critical race and ethnic studies. Topics vary with each offering but might include approaching racial and ethnic formations through a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, including indigenous studies, Black studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies, queer critique, gender studies, transgender studies, performance studies, human rights studies, mixed race studies, legal studies, critical area studies, war and empire studies, environmental studies, science studies, and critical university studies.

Foodie culture today is a live wire in the US American melting pot. From ethnicfusion fads to controversies over the role of racialized chefs in haute cuisine, food offers rich points of entry for theorizing race in the United States. Kyla Wazana Tompkins describes foodie culture, and the academic field of food studies? co-emergence with it, as follows: Foodie culture is founded on problematic racial politics in which white, bourgeois, urban subject positions are articulated through the consumption and informational mastery of foreign, that is, non-Anglo-American food cultures (Racial Indigestion, 2). In response, Tompkins proposes that rather than simply study food itself, we also study eating as a social practice? in order to understand the historical construction of US American whiteness through the production and consumption of racialized bodies and labor. In this course we will look at the racial politics of eating as a social practice, as well as the production of food, in the kitchen and well before it examining the not only of cooking and eating, but also production from the plantation and the meatpackers, and, just as importantly, from the warfront, the militarized border, and the prison. We will study genres of food writing and ways of representing race through food in order to develop a rigorous critical understanding of them. Further, in taking up food as a primary medium through which imaginaries of the United States are constructed, we will get straight to the guts of their racial histories, and we?ll build an appetite for other possibilities.

Days & Times	Room	Instructor	Meeting Dates
TuTh 01:00PM-04:30PM	Remote Instruction	Komori,J.	07/26/21 - 08/27/21