Title: Animal Incorporated: Gastronomy of Care
Lecturer: Chia-ju Chang (Associate Professor of Chinese at Brooklyn College-the City University of New York)
Chairperson: WANG Feng (Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University)
Date: 1:30 pm, June 3rd, 2016 (Friday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
It is important to examine contemporary Chinese gastro-culture and aesthetics of animal consumption. Global consumerism encourages and provides the new Chinese middle class with opportunities to maximize sensuous aesthetic pleasure far beyond the biological imperative of filling up the stomach. Yet if we think of food as both necessity and pleasure in global neoliberal capitalism, we cannot avoid looking at the dubious function that aesthetics performs in the capitalist system: the aesthetic appropriation and cosmeticization of eating, an “event of physiological primitiveness.” I first discuss current Chinese and Western discourses on gastro-aesthetics and critical animal studies, and then examines a prevalent cultural phenomenon in contemporary food and entertainment culture, one that aestheticizes cruelty in popular food culture. I use this as a case to argue that animal voices have long been neglected, and that live animals are transformed into what Carol J. Adams calls the “absent referent” in this domain of cruel gastro-aesthetics that is found in many global societies. This needs to be redressed. By juxtaposing the gastronomic culture in postsocialist China with the Western New Omnivore Movement, I examine not just the actual eating of animals, but also other cultural forms of consumption surrounding meat-eating, such as television food shows, internet blogs and magazines that feature gourmet food. Through this cross-cultural juxtaposition, I observe that what I call “cruel gastronomic aesthetics” is not unique to Chinese culture. What is needed then is a shift in aesthetic discourse from its emphasis on gustatory pleasure to a gastronomic ethics of care, or what the food philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer calls “ethical gourmandism.”
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Chia-ju Chang is an associate professor of Chinese at Brooklyn College-the City University of New York. Her first book in Chinese, 《全球环境想象：中西生态批评实践》/ Global Imagination of Ecological Communities: Chinese and Western Ecocritical Praxis (Jiangsu University Press, 2013), won the 2013 Bureau of Jiangsu Province Journalism and Publication award in China. Her many articles (in both English and Chinese) have been published in the U.S., China and Taiwan. She has served as an executive council of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). She is on ASLE’s Translation Grants Committee and serves as the chair of the Subvention Grants Committee. Currently she is the Kiriyama Professor in the Asia Pacific Center at the University of San Francisco. Currently she is co-editing two ecocriticism anthologies. Her co-edited volume, Ecocriticism in Taiwan: Identity, Environment, and the Arts (edited with Scott Slovic, Lexington, 2016) will be out in June.