The Art of Elastic Politics - by Charles T Lee (Hardcover)

About the Book

Explores how immigrant food practices generate new political imaginaries in the shifting contours of neoliberal capitalism.

Book Synopsis

The Art of Elastic Politics: Ethnic Food, Immigrant Lives and Multiracial Neoliberalism explores how immigrant food practices inspire new ways of rethinking progressive politics in the shifting contours of neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Southern California's Asian restaurant industry, this book develops the concept of elasticity as a theoretical framework for navigating neoliberalism's contradictions.

By examining how the dynamic interplay of ethnic entrepreneurship, immigrant labor and cultural consumption creates subtle, nonlinear opportunities for resistance, empowerment and citizenship contestation, the book challenges conventional political frameworks through a flexible and circuitous approach to contesting precarity and inequality. Bridging political theory, cultural studies, food studies and posthumanism, this interdisciplinary study - organized around the themes of Elastic Food, Elastic Citizenship and Elastic Governance - equips scholars, activists and students with nuanced tools and frameworks for grappling with the challenges and complexities of migration, citizenship, governance and global capitalism in a rapidly evolving world.

Review Quotes

Bridging new materialism, ethnic studies, and food studies, The Art of Elastic Politics combines political theory with ethnographic fieldwork in Asian restaurants to offer a powerful framework for understanding how power, resistance, and social change operate in our interconnected, commodified world. Essential reading for how citizenship, belonging, and political change are being remade in twenty-first century America.--Cristina Beltrán, New York University

Using the proliferation and material culture of Asian restaurants in Southern California as a case study, this book lays out what the author calls The Art of Elastic Politics, where 'resistance' is not simply oppositional but takes on non-linear, circuitous and 'elastic' forms of being political in the everyday. This is a major intervention in political theory, inviting us to rethink democracy, citizenship, rights, power and governance in the era of multiracial neoliberalism. A hugely inspiring read!--Ien Ang, Western Sydney University