Advanced Topics in Literary and Cultural Studies (376-0-1)

Topic

Racial Consumption: Food, Performance, and Embodim

Instructors

Irene Christian Kim
Office Hours: Tuesday/Thursday 12:30 - 1:30

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 2-435: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

Theoretically oriented by the fields of race and ethnic studies, literary studies, and visual culture, this course will chart the material and conceptual practices of consumption in the works of Asian American artists and writers. With units ranging from the aesthetic form and material history of gelatin to olfactory art, experimental cookbooks, and contemporary pop-cultural phenomena like "mukbangs," our course will ask you to think about the intersecting roles race, class, gender, and sexuality play in the production of "taste"—in both sensorial and aesthetic registers. Paying particular attention to how racialized and politicized affects like disgust and pleasure circulate in, through, and across the objects of our study, we will think together about how social and embodied practices figure racial difference. Possible artists and writers include Ruth Ozeki, Alison Kuo, Anicka Yi, Aditi Machado, and Stephanie H. Shih.

Learning Objectives

The critical frameworks and aesthetic traditions cited and refurbished by contemporary artists, writers, and scholars to historicize the emergence of the Asian American subject; the relationship between aesthetics and racialization

Class Materials (Required)

My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki

Insomnia and the Aunt by Tan Lin

Emporium by Aditi Machado

Class Attributes

Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area