AAAS 380Y
Have You Eaten Yet?
Love, Asian Americans, and Beyond
- Institution
- Binghamton University
- Taught
- Spring 2026
- Spring 2027 (scheduled)
Description
The seemingly simple question “Have you eaten yet?” (밥 먹었어?, 你吃飯了吗?, ভা ত খা লা ?, etc.) echoes through many Asian and Asian American households and beyond, often taking the place of an unspoken “I love you.” It reveals the complexities of how love is expressed, withheld, and weaponized in Asian American life. While sharing food often functions as a motif of reconciliation and communion, the same dinner table can also become a site of violence and control, from forced consumption to withheld sustenance, from excessive feeding to body-shaming. These tensions raise key questions about love in the lives of Asian Americans and how everyday negotiations around eating, language, and care reflect broader patterns of power, trauma, and resistance.
This course uses food as its central lens for reading Asian and Asian American literature and culture and beyond. We follow meals, recipes, kitchens, lunchboxes, grocery aisles, agrifood industry, and acts of eating and refusal to examine how everyday food practices shape experiences of race, migration, gender, class, bodily autonomy, and belonging. To make sense of these representations, we draw on key concepts from food studies, ethnic and racial studies, and affect theory, and ask how scenes of producing, cooking, feeding, and eating carry feelings of love, shame, nostalgia, resentment, and desire, while also being structured by histories of empire, war, racial capitalism, patriarchy, and displacement. Through close analysis of literary texts, films, and food-centered cultural phenomena, students will develop frameworks for understanding how food functions as a complex social and emotional language in Asian and Asian American contexts. Major assignments include one group discussion-leading presentation, a midterm book review essay, and a final podcasting assignment.