Sept 30. (9am) [Zoom Meeting] Heather Lee (NYU-Shanghai).
Book Discussion
Gastrodiplomacy: Chinese Exclusion and the Ascent of Chinese Restaurants in New York, 1870-1949 (forthcoming).
This pathbreaking book shows that a handful of Chinese immigrant men in New York changed the way a white majoritarian society ate. At a moment of intense anti-Chinese racism, the Chinese protagonists channeled their political activism through the Chinese restaurant. They presented ideas of China in the décor, restaurant ephemera, and food to renegotiate Chinese and white interracial relations and the status of Chinese people in the United States. For Chinese immigrants, the most important dividends were the financial windfall from the popularity of Chinese food, as well as the more lenient application of Chinese Exclusion to Chinese restaurant owners. Their efforts to stay connected to China produced a transpacific circuit of people, capital, and ideas, making New York into the North American terminus of a transpacific corridor.
RECORDING: Partial Gallery View, Speaker View
Heather Ruth Lee is an Assistant Professor of History at NYU Shanghai. She uses spatial analysis, quantitative data, and archival sources to study the movement of people and capital from Asia after the American Civil War, and how the migration of racialized peoples of Asian descent shaped hierarchies of power in the United States. At NYU Shanghai, Professor Lee teaches courses on the History of New York, Chinese Diaspora, Asian American History, and U.S. History Since 1877. She also leads Humanities Research Lab, where humanities and STEM students converge to answer historical research questions through digital methods (for sample projects see https://historybeyond.com/).
Jeffrey M. Pilcher is a professor of History and Food Studies at the University of Toronto. His books include ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (University of New Mexico Press, 1998), Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food (Oxford University Press, 2012), and Food in World History, 2d ed. (Routledge, 2017). He is a co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Global Food History. He has published special issues developing innovative concepts such as Culinary Infrastructure and Migrant Marketplaces. Oxford University Press will publish his global history of beer in the spring of 2023.
Madeline Y. Hsu is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and served as Director of the Center for Asian American Studies eight years (2006-2014). She was president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and is presently representative-at-large for the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas. She received her undergraduate degrees in History from Pomona College and PhD from Yale University. Her most recent monograph, The Good Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2015), received awards from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association, and the Association for Asian American Studies.
Tyler Anbinder is an emeritus professor of history at George Washington University, where he taught courses on the history of American immigration and the American Civil War era. He is the author of three award-winning books: Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (Oxford University Press, 1992); Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (Simon and Schuster, 2001); and City of Dreams: The 400- Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). Anbinder has won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and served as the Fulbright Thomas Jefferson Distinguished professor of History at the University of Utrecht. He is currently finishing a book entitled This Plentiful Country, a history of the Great Irish Famine refugees in New York City and beyond.
Co-sponsored by the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.