Moving Sideways: Food, Intra-Action, and Elastic Politics

• In Event: Critical Theory Today: Rethinking Agency, Domination, and Revolution

Abstract

This paper will contribute to the panel theme on a critical theoretical rethinking of agency, political action, and transformative change by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the new materialist discussion in the current context of global capitalism and transnational migration. Focusing on the everyday spaces of ethnic restaurants where immigrant restaurateurs, workers, and customers mingle and interact in acquiring the means of survival, inclusion, and belonging in the U.S., it illustrates how a “more-than-human” ethnographic account of the material-discursive becoming of the immigrant subjects/food objects can expand the purview of agency, political action, and transformative change beyond an anthropocentric mode of critical theorizing that does not account for the ways in which matter and environment ontologically constitute the subjects’ political becoming and their strategic fields. Moreover, this “more-than-human” account further engenders an unpredictable horizon of immigrant politics with transformative and strategic implications that a linear political paradigm of revolution/liberation has been unable to capture. As my analysis seeks to illustrate, material-discursive practices such as culinary activities, even when commercialized, may circuitously and unexpectedly lead to democratizing or transformative ends.

The paper first provides the broader geographic and environmental context of the current field research that focuses on Asian restaurants in Southern California, paying particular attention to the racialized status of Asian and Latino immigrants in the region that engenders the present inquiry into their unconventional citizenship contestations. Next, the paper draws on Karen Barad’s conception of “intra-action” – the mutual constitution of entangled agencies – to generate a “more-than-human” analysis in understanding the intricate and unpredictable politics of citizenship inside ethnic restaurants. Proceeding through a material-discursive approach that understands agential enactment as always already incorporating and cutting through elements that are material and discursive, human and nonhuman, and natural and cultural, Barad’s ontological account of “agential realism” helps open up a new understanding of how immigrants in the ethnic restaurant industry can be seen as reinventing the practices of citizenship as “affective,” “biosocial,” and “neo-material” beyond its epistemological juridical-political construct. This ontological, intra-active approach helps reorient existing studies on affective citizenship, biological citizenship, and neo-materialism away from their democratic ethos to reposition immigrant entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers as improvising and actualizing their inclusion and belonging through the material-discursive formations of “affective economy,” “strategic neo-materialism,” and “culturally vibrant biosociality.” Third, drawing on snippets of interviews with a few immigrant subjects from my fieldwork, I analyze the complex and even nondemocratic ways in which the co-constitution of subjects, matter, and environment produce an intra-acting agential space that enables immigrants to utilize the mundane details of producing/consuming ethnic food – thus constituting their political becoming intra-actively with the ethnic food objects and surrounding environment – to improvise and actualize their citizenship in the everyday, in terms of both their citizenly contributions and obtainment of “non-existent rights” (i.e., rights that are not yet existing or codified in law).

For many immigrants, citizenship thus no longer means simply what Arendt once suggested as “the right to have rights,” but rather “the right to reinvent ways of claiming rights.” The “more-than-human” account provided in this study both complicates the foundational mapping of political agency and action in critical theory (i.e., what does it mean when matter and environment in global capitalism always already constitute the subject’s political becoming and their strategic fields?) and engenders a different political horizon wherein immigrants stage disruption and contestation in circuitous ways beyond the linear politics of revolution/liberation. It signals a political becoming on the ground that I term “elastic politics” (overlapping with but departing from Catherine Malabou’s “plastic politics,” which still centers contestations at the level of ideology/consciousness), signaling the polymorphous, bendable and resilient forms that immigrant contestations for citizenship might take. In this elastic becoming, immigrant rights advocates no longer need to view the sovereign state as the only viable rights-granting authority; rather, they may relook at establishments that intersect market and civil society (e.g., ethnic restaurants, universities, hospitals) as capable of dispensing bundles of “non-existent rights” to immigrants in the everyday, thus empowering them by moving sideways.

Author

• Charles T. Lee, Arizona State University