Christine Yano on Anita Mannur’s *Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures*

Anita Mannur, Professor of English and Asian/Asian American Studies at Miami University, has written a book of and for our times. This is not meant to pigeonhole this as a “pandemic book.”  However, it is to recognize that the global pandemic provided a pause and a prompt for our reflections.  Although one might not perceive this upon first reading, when I started re-reading, including the Acknowledgments, it struck me that this book may be considered a paean to the collective trauma of our 21^st century lives, filled with isolation, anxiety, suffering, death, and racial scapegoating.  The trauma goes on in secondary forms of social dysfunction and mental health crises large and small.  In the midst of this, Mannur reflects upon and seeks the salve of intimacy.  The ways in which she does so says as much about her – a self-described “foodie” and cultural critic – as it does about the circumstances.  Simply put, Mannur finds salve in embracing radical “intimate eating publics” – that is, spaces of eating, whether alone or with others, that may be “vexed and contested,” but hold the promise of radical futures.  Every element of these intimate eating publics disrupts the power structures underlying heteronormative assumptions about the culinary and commensality.  In doing so, she offers a vision of reconfigured eating futures founded in fundamental queerness, new possibilities of kinship, and displaced sensate pleasures.

Mannur brings an acute tongue and sensory analysis to a wide range of contemporary samplings, which in itself provides a dizzying array of the author’s scope.  These include the celebrated Indian film, Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia, Nani Power’s Ginger and Ganesh, Michael Rakowitz’s performance art installation Enemy Kitchen, and the popular British television show, The Great British Bake Off.  Mannur also includes Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik’s provocative art installation “The Curry Institute” that invites/forces visitors to smell the fragrance/odor of curry as it wafts, unruly, throughout the museum from the art itself.  (A portion of the work, “To Curry Favor,” provides the cover art of the volume.)  Mannur intersperses textual analyses of these varied examples with scenes from her own life traumas, often painfully and vividly remembered through food.  This tacking from the shared texts to personal experiences animates Mannur’s purposeful blurring of the public and the private.  What ties these together is the assertion of food’s power to traverse time, space, and boundaries.  Food is political and gains its assertions through multiple avenues and histories of sensate knowledge.  And more provocatively, food can be subversive by its seductions of social justice that radicalize the plate of queer tarts into new norms of belonging.

This book is not an easy read, but suggests in its own crypticness the tomes that provide its intellectual and personal archaeology.  This includes, but is not limited to, critical ethnic studies and queer theory, specifically Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Martin Manalansan IV, Gayatri Gopinath, and Michael Warner.   Intimate Eating avails us of an “intimate reading public,” likewise “vexed and contested,” with shimmering radical promise.  That radical promise suggests that our enclavic lives embedded within intersectionalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, space, and more may be broached more fully and deeply than otherwise by such provocations of intimacy.