Calendar of Events
Note: Meetings are usually held on the second Sunday of each month, September through May, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. Currently we are meeting via Zoom, but in-person meetings are held at the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Services Center, 4805 Edgemoor Lane, Bethesda, Maryland, and occasionally at other venues. The meetings are open to anyone. However, certain meetings may require a fee.
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Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA
February 14, 2021 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Speaker: Robert Ji-Song Ku, Binghamton, New York
Sunday, February 14
2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Zoom Meeting
(Members will receive a link and passcode.)
Robert Ji-Song Ku is an associate professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton
University of the State University of New York. Prior to Binghamton, he taught at the California
Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and Hunter College of the City University of New York. His research interests include Asian American studies, food studies, and studies of transnational Korean popular culture. He is the author of Dubious Gastronomy: The
Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA (2014) and co-editor of three anthologies: Future Yet to
Come: Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Modern Korea (forthcoming 2021), Pop Empires: Transnational Flows of India and Korea (2019), and Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (2013). His essays and reviews appear in a variety of publications, including the Journal of Asian American Studies, Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, and Food, Culture, and Society. He also co-edits the Food in Asia and the Pacific series for the University of Hawaii Press and is currently
completing a book tentatively titled, Korean Food in the Age of K-pop. In 2016, he taught at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea, as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar. Born in Korea, he grew up in Hawaii and currently lives in Binghamton, New York.
SPAM (not unwanted emails but the canned meat), the California roll, Chinese take-out, kimchi, monosodium glutamate, dogmeat. These are examples of what Robert Ji-Song Ku calls “dubious” Asian foods. Strongly associated with Asian and Asian American gastronomy, each is commonly
understood as somehow ersatz, depraved, or simply bad. As such, Ku contends that these foods share a spiritual fellowship with Asians in the United States in that the Asian presence—be it
culinary or corporeal—is often considered a watered-down, counterfeit, or debased manifestation
of a so-called real thing. Like these foods, Asian Americans have been regarded as doubly
dubious—as insufficiently Asian and unreliably American. But rather than insisting on the
authenticity of the Asian American experience, Ku argues that the very notion of authenticity is
troubled, troubling, and troublesome, and that the dubious is often meaningfully delicious.