Free Lunchtime Zoom Talk "Sprucing Up Leftovers: American Discourse on Japanese Cuisine, 1945-1992"

Free lunchtime zoom lecture organized by the Concordia Food Studies Working Group with Éloi Salvail-Lacoste, M.A. Candidate (History Dept).

In this talk, Éloi will explore the evolution of Japanese cooking in American discourse, from the end of World War II through the end of the Cold War. During this period of important changes and tensions in U.S-Japan relations, Japanese cuisine went from a niche, exotic novelty to a monument of fine dining. Éloi will argue that this is imputable to the fact that, at least on a national level, white, highly educated, upper-middle class—rather than Japanese-American—food writers popularized Japanese cuisine in the United States. Those writers often perpetuated older Orientalist tropes and used Japanese cuisine as a mean to accrue cultural capital and perform a form of cosmopolitanism which had become fashionable during the Cold War era.

Join the event online: Zoom.