The Art of Elastic Politics: Ethnic Food, Immigrant Lives and Multiracial Neoliberalism

Explores how immigrant food practices generate new political imaginaries in the shifting contours of neoliberal capitalism Develops elasticity as a political framework for navigating neoliberalism’s contradictions, offering flexible and circuitous strategies for resisting precarity and inequality Reconceptualizes ethnic restaurants as subtle political sites whose more-than-human dynamics foster strategic implications for rethinking democracy, citizenship, rights, and resistance in the evolving landscape of multiracial neoliberalism Grounds theory in lived immigrant experience through a triadic analysis of ethnic entrepreneurship, immigrant labor, and cultural consumption in Southern California’s Asian restaurant industry, illuminating how immigrant communities craft everyday forms of empowerment and resistance Proposes strategic posthumanism to rethink capitalist instrumentality as an immanent condition of the posthuman world, arguing for its strategic redirection – emergent through ambiguity and circuity – as a generative force for progressive political engagement Introduces transdisciplinary political theory, an original method that integrates political theory, cultural studies, food studies, ethnic studies, citizenship studies, critical consumer studies, critical geography, posthumanism and ethnographic fieldwork to generate new theoretical frameworks and chart elastic strategies for posthuman resistance and progressive politics in an era shaped by neoliberal democracy 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.