Food in Asia and the Pacific

Christine R. Yano and Robert Ji-Song Ku, series editors

Food is an enduring topic that has gained significant scholarly interest in the last decade. Food in Asia and the Pacific showcases new works focused on food in the Asia-Pacific region and its diasporic iterations, highlighting the commonalities that the area and cultures might bring to the subject. The book series is disciplinarily diverse, drawing from the fields of geography, sociology, anthropology, history, globalization studies, gender studies, science and technology studies, development studies, ethnic studies, and cultural studies. The editors see the Asia-Pacific region and its diaspora evoking particular global relationships and domestic infrastructures: center-periphery, post-colonialism, imperialisms, and politicized imaginaries. The goal is to bring food to bear in considering these and other pertinent relationships and infrastructures. The series thus asks the following questions: How does food become a productive lens to examine larger structures in the Asia-Pacific region and its diaspora? How do the particularities of Asia-Pacific and its diaspora provide significant case studies applicable to practices elsewhere? How is food scholarship in the Asia-Pacific region and its diaspora especially relevant in the context of globalization, ethnic revitalization, economic challenges, and probing health problems? How is food connected to issues of happiness and well-being in Asia-Pacific and its diaspora? Food in Asia and the Pacific highlights food-related scholarship that is theoretically astute, ethnographically dense, historically rich, and politically engaged, while maintaining the regional focus.

The field of area studies has come under intense scrutiny in recent years, particularly when it appears to reinscribe geographic, cultural, and political boundaries that have become increasingly blurred in the socially mobile twenty-first century. While acknowledging this, the series considers those blurred boundaries as an opportunity to examine the processes surrounding food under the complex conditions of modernity and postmodernity. It also treats the regional focus—including the inherent mobility of transnational flows, migration, and global capitalism therein—as productive elements rather than as reifying limitation. By bringing together books that amalgamate food studies with Asia-Pacific studies as well as diaspora studies, Food in Asia and the Pacific hopes to locate mobility itself as the framework from which scholarship may enrich our understanding of our complexly globalized world.