Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures

by Anita Mannur

Overview

In Intimate Eating Anita Mannur examines how notions of the culinary can create new forms of kinship, intimacy, and social and political belonging. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and queer studies, Mannur traces the ways in which people of color, queer people, and other marginalized subjects create and sustain this belonging through the formation of “intimate eating publics.” These spaces—whether established in online communities or through eating along in a restaurant—blur the line between public and private. In analyses of Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, Nani Power’s Ginger and Ganesh, Ritesh Batra’s film The Lunchbox, Michael Rakowitz’s performance art installation Enemy Kitchen, and The Great British Bake Off, Mannur focuses on how racialized South Asian and Arab brown bodies become visible in various intimate eating publics. In this way, the culinary becomes central to discourses of race and other social categories of difference. By illuminating how cooking, eating, and distributing food shapes and sustains social worlds, Mannur reconfigures how we think about networks of intimacy beyond the family, heteronormativity, and nation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478017820
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/18/2022
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.41(d)

About the Author

Anita Mannur is Associate Professor of English at Miami University, author of Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture, and coeditor of Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. The Tiffin Box and Gendered Mobility  23
2. Cooking for One and the Gustatory Gaze  47
3. Eat, Dwell, Orient: Food Networks and Asian/American Cooking Communities  73
4. Tasting Conflict: Eating, Radical Hospitality, and Enemy Cuisine  99
5. Baking and the Intimate Eating Public  129
Epilogue  143
Notes  147
Works Cited  161
Index  171

Editorial Reviews

"Mannur brings an acute tongue and sensory analysis to a wide range of contemporary samplings, which in itself provides a dizzying array of the author's scope."--Christine R. Yano "Society for U.S. Intellectual History" (11/7/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"[Mannur's] reflections move back and forth between a scholarly tone which at times does not recuse itself from jargon and a personal voice that is able to express raw--at times joyful, at times painful-emotions. Both styles are effective in weaving engaging arguments and developing a critical analysis of the material at hand. Mannur's memories of family dinners and the progressive dissolution of her marriage are honest, direct, and passionate, without invalidating the rigor of her analysis. . . . In Intimate Eating, Mannur pushes us to embark on our own explorations to reassess pieces of popular culture that we may be familiar with but whose power we may not be fully aware of."--D. Sutton "Food Anthropology" (5/2/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"Anita Mannur's extraordinary analyses of cooking and eating in photography, film, television, novels, blogs, and performance art creates new forms of the public in unexpected places: inside bedrooms and kitchens, alongside food trucks, and under the white tent of The Great British Bake Off. She generates in her readers a hunger for queer kinships with friends and strangers forged outside of the patriarchal domain of family life. Intimate Eating is powerful reading for Asian American studies, queer and feminist of color studies, and food studies: I want to eat every meal with this book."--Bakirathi Mani, author of "Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America"

"In this brilliant, urgent, and necessary book Anita Mannur underscores one of the central tenets of neoliberalism: the increased privatization of everyday life and attacks on the public. She vividly shows how nonnormative subjects navigate this trend, turning private spaces and practices via the culinary into ones that foster sociability, intimacy, community, and belonging. Through the provocative and timely concept of 'intimate eating publics, ' Mannur has captured the pleasures and possibilities of publics and how they act as sites of forging radical ways of belonging."--Mark Padoongpatt, author of "Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America"

From the Publisher

Anita Mannur’s extraordinary analyses of cooking and eating in photography, film, television, novels, blogs, and performance art creates new forms of the public in unexpected places: inside bedrooms and kitchens, alongside food trucks, and under the white tent of The Great British Bake Off. She generates in her readers a hunger for queer kinships with friends and strangers forged outside of the patriarchal domain of family life. Intimate Eating is powerful reading for Asian American studies, queer and feminist of color studies, and food studies: I want to eat every meal with this book.

Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America - Bakirathi Mani

"A valuable guide to the vexed terrain of dining in its relation to social and political community."
 

MELUS - Parama Roy

"Mannur brings an acute tongue and sensory analysis to a wide range of contemporary samplings, which in itself provides a dizzying array of the author’s scope."

Society for U.S. Intellectual History - Christine R. Yano

In this brilliant, urgent, and necessary book Anita Mannur underscores one of the central tenets of neoliberalism: the increased privatization of everyday life and attacks on the public. She vividly shows how nonnormative subjects navigate this trend, turning private spaces and practices via the culinary into ones that foster sociability, intimacy, community, and belonging. Through the provocative and timely concept of ‘intimate eating publics,’ Mannur has captured the pleasures and possibilities of publics and how they act as sites of forging radical ways of belonging.

Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America - Mark Padoongpatt

"In theorizing food cultures as social and aesthetic formations, Mannur vividly describes how food and the sense of belonging that food uniquely cultivates can turn a sense of alienation and even loneliness into intimacy and pleasure."

Winterthur Portfolio - Rumya S. Putcha

"[Mannur's] reflections move back and forth between a scholarly tone which at times does not recuse itself from jargon and a personal voice that is able to express raw—at times joyful, at times painful–emotions. Both styles are effective in weaving engaging arguments and developing a critical analysis of the material at hand. Mannur’s memories of family dinners and the progressive dissolution of her marriage are honest, direct, and passionate, without invalidating the rigor of her analysis. . . . In Intimate Eating, Mannur pushes us to embark on our own explorations to reassess pieces of popular culture that we may be familiar with but whose power we may not be fully aware of."

Food Anthropology - D. Sutton