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.

Author Biography

Charles T. Lee is Associate Professor of Justice and Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Working across the fields of political theory, cultural studies, cultural politics, and critical citizenship studies, his research explores innovative formations of political agency and cultural resistance within the global circuits of neoliberal capitalism. He is the author of Ingenious Citizenship: Recrafting Democracy for Social Change (Duke University Press, 2016), which received the 2017 Transdisciplinary Book Award from the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University.

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