Critical Social Inquiry 0223 - Looking at Food in South Asia

This course will examine how questions of food and consumption have impacted and interacted with issues of South Asian modernity, culture, gender, society and politics in complex ways. We shall connect how the politics of taste have come to be governed by historical processes of human generated environmental changes and colonialism wherein food operates as a site of paradox and conflict, resistance and alterity. We shall cover questions that relate food to national identity, to environment, to systems of oppression, to ideas of ethnicity and migration among other things. Apart from employing critical readings from anthropological, sociological, political economy works etc., we shall also explore how food gets represented in contemporary films, stories, cookbooks, media and visual arts from the region and South Asian diaspora.

Power, Community and Social Justice Multiple Cultural Perspectives Writing and Research Students are expected to spend at least six to eight hours a week of preparation and work outside of class time.