Topics in AMCS: What Are You Eating for Dinner? Politics of Exotic and Authentic Asian American Food
This course unpacks the journey of Asian America from exclusion to inclusion through food!
Evaluating constructions of Asian American food as disgusting, foreign, smelly, to modern constructs of curiosity, authenticity, and liberalism the course encourages students to recognize, interrogate, and record their food journeys as ways in which they participate in society, culture, and structures through the intimacies of food. This class will tie your personal “tastes” to literary theories.
Dr. Ghosh is excited to explore lived and learned realities of Asian American foodways in people's lives, families, cultures, memories nostalgia, while also unpacking the role of food as an instrument for marginalization, discrimination, labor exploitation, malnutrition, assimilation, beautification, sexualization, tourism, fusion, and new transnational illiberalism. Bring your appetites, lunches, and critical thoughts with you to this class! Texts of study include diverse literary genres, film, shows, and surveys of your popular haunts in STL.
Dr. Ghosh’s research focuses on displacement aesthetics in Asian American and Postcolonial Studies, interrogating how themes of displacement, diaspora, migration, immigration laws, new materialisms manifest in literary forms and disrupt questions of identity, culture, ethics, alterity, and nationhood. With a background in Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies, she comparatively studies Asian American texts, across a variety of Asian American ethnicities to investigate how these ethnicities represent their unique experiences of displacement across generations, migration waves, and political events to formulate their identities and rights in diaspora, in their families, and set them apart from other ethnicities.
