Intimate Eating

In Intimate Eating Anita Mannur examines how notions of the culinary can create new forms of kinship, intimacy, and social and political belonging. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and queer studies, Mannur traces the ways in which people of color, queer people, and other marginalized subjects create and sustain this belonging through the formation of “intimate eating publics.” These spaces—whether established in online communities or through eating along in a restaurant—blur the line between public and private. In analyses of Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, Nani Power’s Ginger and Ganesh, Ritesh Batra’s film The Lunchbox, Michael Rakowitz’s performance art installation Enemy Kitchen, and The Great British Bake Off, Mannur focuses on how racialized South Asian and Arab brown bodies become visible in various intimate eating publics. In this way, the culinary becomes central to discourses of race and other social categories of difference. By illuminating how cooking, eating, and distributing food shapes and sustains social worlds, Mannur reconfigures how we think about networks of intimacy beyond the family, heteronormativity, and nation.

Introduction

This introduction to the special issue “Educational Undergrowth” proposes an ecological view of educational institutions and practices, one that foregrounds the porosity of borders so that entities and institutions that can sometimes seem distinct are thought of as always entangled. The editors elaborate this ecological view by drawing on theories of coloniality, especially the work of Sylvia Wynter (and her human/Man distinction) and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (in The Undercommons). In this framing, the university appears as a specific, but not isolated, part of a colonial ecology structured around producing Man. This allows both for critical accounts of how coloniality shapes institutions such as schools and universities, always in relation to many other institutions and sites, and for speculative experiments in queer, decolonial, abolitionist education. The introduction intervenes in contemporary leftist debates about the university in particular and education more generally by offering a way of attuning to critical, abolitionist, and decolonial projects as specific but intraactive outgrowths of the colonial ecology and myriad disruptive projects (happening both in and outside of institutionalized schools). On the one hand, educational undergrowth accounts for how resources circulate unevenly in the colonial ecology so that the “growth” of some people, institutions, and projects is possible only because others are deprived, defunded, and disinvited. On the other hand, it draws on affect theory, new materialisms, and work in decolonial and critical ethnic studies to valorize otherwise marginal, bewildering, errant educational encounters that are always taking place in the undergrowth of the university.

Classroom Heroes

This chapter explores the use of comics as pedagogical tools in interdisciplinary courses such as Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies. Specifically, the chapter investigates the ways in which the superhero comic Ms. Marvel is an important example of feminist and anti-racist pedagogy for these courses. By framing the textual analysis of the comic through gender and critical race theorists such as Sara Ahmed and Shireen Roshanravan, the chapter demonstrates the ways in which Kamala Khan, the protagonist, grapples with villains and difficulties that reflect the societal issues of sexism, racism, and Islamophobia. Kamala Khan’s battle against injustice resonates with many readers’ everyday experiences, and disrupts both genre-based and hegemonic structures of oppression and heroism. By teaching Ms. Marvel through the lens of gender studies and critical ethnic studies, this text enables students to gain a new perspective on race, justice, and “terror,” which allows them to be more just, empathetic learners.

Piss(ed): The Biopolitics of the Bathroom

This article analyzes two recent works by transgender performance artist Cassils, PISSED and Fountain (2017), which were created in response to the Trump administration's decision to rescind federal protections allowing transgender students to use the restroom of their choice. While Cassils primarily conceptualized PISSED/Fountain as a queering of binary, essentialist understandings of gendered embodiment, I draw on performance, queer, and critical ethnic studies to illustrate that these pieces simultaneously challenge other kinds of oppositional embodiments, particularly health versus disease and citizen versus alien and/or terrorist; conceptualizations the state frequently deploys to surveil and control marginalized populations. PISSED/Fountain offer audiences a new strategy for both exposing and contesting state violence: these pieces can be read as a politically strategic disidentification with the state's classification of certain bodies and their excretions as ``deviant'' and ``toxic'' in order to purposefully ``terrorize'' the state's bio- and necropolitical aims.

The Difference latinidad Makes

This essay-review examines three recent works in the study of Chicanx literature, Robert Con Davis-Undiano’s Mestizos Come Home!: Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity (2017), Karen Roybal’s Archives of Dispossession: Recovering the Testimonios of Mexican American Herederas, 1848–1960 (2017), and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (2016). López is primarily concerned with how the books position themselves in relation to broader discussions around latinidad. She structures her investigation around three main axes: racial discourse, intersections of politics and form, and periodization in literary studies. The books, she argues, trace an aesthetic and political trajectory leading from concerns over representation and canon formation to wholesale interrogations of genre and political action. López reads this trajectory in the context of theoretical developments in Critical Ethnic studies that privilege difference over diversity.