As I was thinking about how to make today's post relevant to both my blog and to the topics we discussed in class Thursday and going through my notes, I suddenly decided to re-watch one of the video lectures we discussed in class about "Dubious Gastronomy," narrated by Robert Ku, an Asian American Studies professor at SUNY Binghamton. I will post the video below (it's pretty long) but basically Professor Ku's whole lecture was focused on the stigmatization by Asians of certain culturally-adapted Asian-American foods, like Chop Suey, California Rolls, and dishes made with SPAM, distinctly "fake" and "unauthentic" foods created to appeal to the conservative American palate and how inaccurate and ignorant it is to even label something as "authentic." As Robert Ku says:
"The Asian presence [in America] is a dubious thing, neither legitimate nor
authentic, neither Asian nor American. It is perpetually liminal, always
conditional, never value free, and unnaturally hovers above, below, and in between
easier discrete categories."
