A Critical Culinary Genealogy of Japanese Foodways

Abstract: This article considers the relationship between food, power, and transnational racialization through an examination of Japanese foodways and food-related discourses. Drawing on scholarship in Asian American studies, critical food studies, and cultural studies, I argue that these foodways both reflect and contest ideological discourses of Japanese racial homogeneity, revealing Japanese culinary identity not as self-contained but at the interstices of global flows of colonial power relations. In doing so, I theorize an approach I call critical culinary genealogy , which reads together personal experience, local histories, and cultural discourses surrounding food to unsettle official or dominant narratives about race, nation, and identity.