Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

I explore foraging poetics and politics in Wong’s Forage (2007) and Chin’s Eating Wildly (2014) through a trope of “interstice” from both its racial and environmental aspects. I show how the two writers of Chinese background discuss urban foraging in a similar yet paradoxically different way. I argue that urban foraging and its variants discussed here, such as foraging all forms of food substance in the physical world or even words and an art of writing which feed our minds in a metaphysical sense presents the flaneur of Chinese descent. Chinese Canadian/American environmental thinking is creating an interstice in both diasporic narratives and ecocriticism. It reveals a relational potential for “subversive” sustainability against hegemonic capitalist food regimes as well as spatial and environmental/food injustice. I will investigate how foraging, as a daily practice, and as a metaphor represented in literary works, provides a guideline of resilient foodways for urban dwellers, regardless of race, class, gender, and generation. The rich connotations embedded in foraging further dismantle the nature/culture, human/other-than-human divides. Wong’s speaker and Chin’s narrator are situated in this interstitial space. Both foraging discourses in their aesthetic, ethnic, and environmental complexities challenge dominant white foraging narratives. In their texts, Chineseness is subtly revealed through specific food discourses that present urban foraging as a subversive act. Gradually, through a healing process of foraging art, the protagonists rediscover and reconcile with their true self fully. I aim to unveil the rich implications urban foraging has eth(n)ically, environmentally, and aesthetically.