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Jul 01, 2025
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Fall 2025 Graduate Catalog
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AAS 565 - Food, Labor and Asian America
¿An authentic taste of Asia¿ is a marketing phrase haunted by the violent histories of Orientalism, Western expansion and wars in Asia. In truth, the success and popularity of some Asian food is more than the celebration of the immigrant work ethic. Behind the popularity are geopolitical and labor issues. The consumption of beef and poultry in the U.S., for example, is intimately connected to the exploitation of immigrants from the global south. Undocumented immigrants and refugees from Southeast Asia, East Africa and the Americas perform the dirty task of slaughtering millions of animals: chickens, turkeys, pigs, ducks, sheep, lamb, calves. In 2009 alone, 33,300,000 cattle were killed for their meat in the United States. Immigrant laborers of American industrial slaughterhouses carry out dirty and dangerous work, killing and dismembering animals even as the laborers themselves live in crowded, unsanitary quarters. Similarly, the cooks of America¿s kitchens are immigrants from Asia and other parts of the world. This new MA course focuses on the emerging field known as ¿food studies,¿ in particular the politics and histories of Asian food and its popularity in the United States. If the old adage is ¿we are what we eat,¿ what does it mean that Asian food in the U.S. is intimately connected to the histories of wars in Asia, undocumented labor, and the exploitation of immigrant food workers?
3 credits
Grading Letter graded (A, A-, B+, etc.)
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