Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures

Anita Mannur's Intimate Eating explores how culinary notions create new forms of kinship, intimacy, and social and political belonging, focusing on marginalized subjects' creation of "intimate eating publics" that blur the line between public and private. She highlights how racialized South Asian and Arab brown bodies become visible in various intimate eating publics, reconfiguring our understanding of networks of intimacy beyond the family, heteronormativity, and nation.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 192 pages
Publication date: 18 March 2022
Publisher: Duke University Press

Anita Mannur's book "Intimate Eating" explores how culinary concepts can shape new forms of kinship, intimacy, and social and political belonging. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and queer studies, Mannur examines how people of color, queer individuals, and other marginalized groups create and maintain this belonging through the formation of "intimate eating publics." These spaces, whether online communities or shared dining experiences, blur the boundaries between public and private. Mannur's analysis includes works such as Julie Powells' "Julie and Julia," Nani Powers' "Ginger and Ganesh," Ritesh Batra's film "The Lunchbox," Michael Rakowitz's performance art installation "Enemy Kitchen," and "The Great British Bake Off." She highlights how racialized South Asian and Arab brown bodies become visible in various intimate eating publics, emphasizing the culinary's central role in discussions of race and other social categories of difference. By illuminating the ways in which cooking, eating, and distributing food shape and sustain social worlds, Mannur challenges traditional notions of intimacy beyond the family, heteronormativity, and nation.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478017820