Aftertaste of Empire: Cultural Imperialism and Asian Nationalisms
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ICC Sophia Food Studies Unit: Online Lecture Series 2026 with
Dr. Krishnendu Ray
May 19, 2026, 21:00-22:30 (JST) / 08:00-09:30 (US EDT) / 13:00-14:30 (GMT)
Meeting ID: 984 0519 4039
Meeting password: 572276
No registration necessary
“In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people… The Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.” Oscar Wilde (1891)
“Why do Americans love the food of the people they have gone to war with?” Madhur Jaffrey (2021)
Does geopolitics have anything to do with gastronomy? Madhur Jaffrey seems to think so and Oscar Wilde hints at the broader question of style, reality and the power of representation, positing a relationship between taste and geopolitics that is rarely interrogated. Given the chasm between the quotidian world of food on the plate and the grand architecture of geopolitics, that dissonance is inevitable. Yet, that gap grows more glaring with the current international tumult. The second Trump administration has ruptured the post-war international institutional structure of governance under US hegemony, revealing the seams of the system that was taken for granted. This moment of disruption is an opportune one to interrogate the relationship between imperial power and good taste.
There is a rich and varied literature on how the food system – especially production and distribution – is shaped by capitalism and the Cold War. The Slow Food Movement emerged as a retort to Americanization of the global food system. McDonaldization became a way to talk about deskilling and corporatization of the food system. Yet, current discussions of good taste in gastronomy are unaccounted for with any geopolitical insight. Is it because the aesthetic form of food has no relationship to the interstate system, unlike say literature or movies or music? Merely posing the question reveals the limits of that presumption. Much of the literature on soft power and gastrodiplomacy is promiscuous and poorly theorized. This is an attempt to get past those constructions and postulate a reason why and how Americans came to love the food of the people they have gone to war with.
Krishnendu Ray is a Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU and the Director of the Doctoral Program. He was the Chair of the department from 2012-2021. He is the author of The Migrant’s Table (2004) and The Ethnic Restaurateur (2016) and the co-editor of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (2012) and Practicing Food Studies (2024). He was a faculty member and the Dean of Liberal Arts at The Culinary Institute of America (1996-2005) and has taught for a decade at the Slow Food University in Bra-Pollenzo, Italy. He was the President of The Association for the Study of Food and Society (2014-2018). He was an editor of the Food Studies journal Gastronomica (2021-2024). He is a James Breard Foundation judge on food journalism.
This talk is organized by Maria Alejandra Dorado Vinay (PhD student at Sophia University GPGS, ICC Research Assistant) and James Farrer (Professor, Sophia University) for the ICC Research Unit “Sophia Food Studies”.
