Manhood, Confusionism and Pan-Asian Cuisine: Chef Stories

• In Event: Food - Media - Asia - Gender

Abstract

In Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (2010), Kuan-Hsing Chen challenges scholars to double down on efforts to decolonize minds by rethinking entrenched ideas of knowledge production. This paper argues that celebrity chefs who claim cultural expertise (and family connections) to both “Asia” and “the West” are important agents in facilitating the sort of attitudinal shift that Chen envisions. As they whet global appetites for multiple culinary adventures, chefs embody micro and macro historical legacies and gently guide audiences to engage with new dishes, ideas, and reconsiderations of the past. But they also weave fantasies of difference and sameness that erase conflict, marginalization, and power. What can we learn from both individual and collective “chef stories” of gendered, generational, and socio-economic sojourning? In what ways do their narratives return us to well-worn stereotypes of gender in cultural production? Where do they surprise and revise? Four celebrity chefs and the digital archives in which they are embedded will be considered briefly: Martin Yan, Ming Tsai, Andre Chiang, and Jet Tila. All have claims on Asia (as place and imaginary), fusion cuisine, and diasporic/transnational tales of Asia (and America) in motion. They illustrate what John Tomlinson (1999) has called the “complex connectivities” of globality. His framework of deterritorialization and reterritorialization will augment Chen in considering how celebrity chefs render and revise the past as they cook.

Author

• Staci Ford, The University of Hong Kong