Race, Nation, and American Food Culture

Uses theories of race, ethnicity, and nation to ask questions about boundaries, categories, and distinctions about the American food system. Addresses the following questions: How are race, ethnicity, and national identity shaped by patterns of migration? How do processes like multiculturalism, panethnicity, and blending change the meanings and salience of these terms? How do symbols and systems of authenticity shape meaning-making around ethnoracial and national inequality? What does food have to do with race/ethnicity/nation? How are cultural products, like cuisine, markers of broader systems of inequality? How do these systems of inequality affect access to food, what we eat, the workplace, and racialized bodies? How does food serve as a marker of distinction in terms of race, ethnicity, nation, class, and gender?

This course encourages students to read broadly in literatures of race, ethnicity, nation, migration and engage theories and ideas in conversation and debate across literatures to develop analytical strategies for understanding the complex landscape of ethnoracial and national inequality in the United States. By focusing analysis on cultural themes and specifically the case of American food culture, students are encouraged to question the utility and applicability of the abstract theories we encounter as well as the contributions and complications of each theory in relation to the others we discuss through a common language of cultural products, most specifically, the accessible discourse of food in American life.