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.

A poetics of sensuality: Xenophobia and same-sex intimacy in cane/cain

This article offers a reading of the ways in which the short film, cane/cain (directed by Jordache Ellapen, adopts a poetics of sensuality to both unsettle and undergird its themes of South Asian migration, sexual intimacy and xenophobia in South Africa. While both homosexuality and xenophobia are not uncommon sites of public discourses in South Africa, cane/cain unearths the less visible faces of both by centring Brown bodies in corporeal collisions of sexual intimacy and of xenophobic violence to disrupt normative and binary categories of sex, race and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa. Utilizing the symbolic currency of sugarcane as an aesthetic and narrative pivot, cane/cain constructs a tension between the cinematic pleasure elicited by its poetics of sensuality and its discomfiting themes of homosexual intimacy and xenophobic intolerance to insert the South Asian subject into the discourses of race, sexuality and nationality in South Africa.

Rituals of Restorative Resistance: Healing Cultural Trauma and Cultural Amnesia through Cultural Anamnesis and Collective Memory

Using a womanist auto-ethnographic approach, this essay presents an anamnestic remedy for healing cultural trauma and cultural amnesia within the African American community. The essay narrates the creation then infusion of rituals of restorative resistance into the liturgy of a traditional, urban black Baptist Church as a means of resistance, resilience, and restoration. By commemorating the sacrifices of Jesus and enslaved African ancestors in eucharist rituals that are enhanced with sacred songs, readings, and symbols, the liturgy expands the meaning of “Do This in Remembrance of Me” (1 Corinthians 11:24) to “Re-Member Me.” Drawing especially on work of Engelbert Mveng, Delores S. Williams, Barbara A. Holmes, Linda E. Thomas, and JoAnne Marie Terrell, and combining theology and anthropology, the essay describes a hermeneutic of healing within the community. It argues (1) that participation in enactment of rituals of restorative resistance decolonizes minds and deconstructs negative Western characterizations of black and brown bodies and (2) that ritualistic inversion and transformation of painful histories and traumatic stories into narratives and symbols of endurance and faith can re-invent, re-construct, and re-member individuals and communities into whole and healed entities.

Staging Intersectionality

This essay follows the making of a queer of colour aesthetic space in the form of a music video entitled Brother, within a largely homogenous white University. The video places white heteronormativity on the periphery whilst intersectional brown bodies take the centre. It inverts racist and fetishistic tropes in music video culture and reverses the white male gaze. The making of the video created a small brown island in a sea of white as a vision of a future brown space protected from the ubiquitous, ambivalently festishizing white gaze; a gaze that projects its own narrative onto bodies of colour. It puts forward a thesis of racial agency, whereby the performance of “race” is scripted by the person of colour and not provoked by the construct of whiteness.

Sandra Bland at the cross: A womanist reading of Mark 15:40-47

How do women who lack power and privilege experience the cross? How do women who lack power and privilege view privileged men at the cross? How do such questions probe issues of Jesus’s death in the Markan passion narrative? This article employs a womanist hermeneutic of “gazing” to interpret differently the complexity of women in close proximity to death while interrogating one particular woman’s close proximity to death in contemporary memory: Sandra Bland. Particularly, a womanist hermeneutic of gazing coupled with a womanist hermeneutic of suspicion provides a liberating space for nuanced engagement with the women who gaze upon Jesus’s crucifixion from afar. Recognizing specifically that the Gospel of Mark uses the Greek word βλέπω ( blepō) to identify “seeing” as a metaphor for belief, how does a womanist understanding of the Greek term θεωρέω ( theōreō, which the gospel writer uses sparingly) crack open the text for contemporary audiences? Engaging issues of power, privilege, and death in relationship to the “gaze” of Mark 15:40-47, this article highlights that the women who attempt to anoint Jesus’s body in the Markan narrative, because of their gender in the highly charged testosterone environment of a militarized imperial execution, have more “skin in the game,” different from the privileged position of men in the text. What happens when women are confronted with men who exhibit high levels of masculine testosterone and masculine identity? Like Sandra Bland, they are closer to death. Accordingly, thinking through the women who go to anoint Jesus with contemporary women today means that women who are often closer to death must continue the analytical work of “gazing”, as found in Mark 15:47 to the point that returning the “gaze” produces change for those closest to death (e.g., black and brown bodies close to militarized imperial violence).

Reclaiming Arab “Skin”

FQ columnist Bilal Qureshi turns a spotlight on Kaouther Ben Hania’s provocative and daring feature film The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020). Nominated for the Oscar for Best International Feature as Tunisia’s first official nominee, Skin is a long-overdue satirization of that earnest and recurring narrative about the helpless migrant refugee and noble white saviors. In telling the story of Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni), a Syrian refugee who makes a Faustian bargain with an art world superstar, Skin asks what it means to be free. Turning the psychological experience of marginalization into a work of palpable and visceral storytelling, the film explores urgent themes that encapsulate the centuries of violence—both physical and psychological—that cultural colonialism has inflicted on brown bodies.

The Room Where It Happens: Reflections on Being a Black Woman in the Academy

The Black Lives Matter movement emerged in 2013 as a result of George Zimmerman being acquitted for the death of Trayvon Martin. Until recently, the movement was mostly limited to violence inflicted on Black and Brown bodies at the hands of the police. More recently scholars, have extended the movement to include the experiences of minorities in academia with the purpose of addressing the institutional biases along with the racial and ethnic micro-aggressions that result from them. The purpose of this essay is to explore micro-aggressions and how they have impacted my life as a Black female scholar in the academy. In my discussion, I provide direct accounts of racialized and gendered experiences that have shaped me. The experiences highlighted in this essay reflect the broader challenges that minority faculty experience when they attempt to be gain visibility and respect in their disciplines.

Creating Strong Titanium/Titanium Hydride Brown Bodies at Ambient Pressure and Moderate Temperatures

A simple, low temperature, method, hydrogen-enhanced atomic transport (HEAT), for creating metallic-bonded brown bodies of order 40% bulk density in molds of designed shape from Ti metal particles is introduced. In this initial study 40 micron titanium particles were poured into graphite molds, then heated to temperatures equal to or greater than 650 °C for four hours in a flowing ambient pressure gas mixture containing some hydrogen led to brown body formation that closely mimicked the mold shape. The brown bodies were shown to be dense, metallic bonded, and consisted of primarily Ti metal, but also some TiH. It is postulated that hydrogen is key to the sintering mechanism: it enables the formation of short-lived TiHx species, volatile at the temperatures employed, that lead to sintering via an Ostwald Ripening mechanism. Data consistent with this postulate include findings that brown bodies are formed with hydrogen present (HEAT process) had mechanical robustness and only suffered plastic deformation at high pressure (ca. 5000 Atm). In contrast, brown bodies made in identical conditions, except the flowing gas did not contain hydrogen, were brittle, and broke into micron scale particles under much lower pressure. HEAT appears to have advantages relative to existing titanium metal part manufacturing methods such as powder injection molding that require many more steps, particularly debinding, and other methods, such as laser sintering, that are slower, require very expensive hardware and expert operation.