UC Irvine

In 2013, culture writer John Powers declared Korean American celebrity chef David Chang the king of the “Umami Era.” The phrase described the rising popularity of Asian/American chefs and ingredients in mainstream American popular culture in the 2000s—a phenomenon that disrupted the way the industry valorized certain “ethnic” foods and food makers. This dissertation takes the so-called “Umami Era” as a starting point from which to analyze the shifting place of Asian/American taste in the United States. I argue that umami is a floating signifier—an assemblage of constantly shifting discourses and relations that combine to form a gustatory flavor as well as a racialized category of distinction. The value that umami signifies—its cultural capital—is rooted in Asian racialization, global Asian soft power, Asian/American culinary production, and Asian/American community formation. Theoretically grounded in Asian American studies, I use the interdisciplinary methodologies and intersectional imperatives of feminist cultural studies to analyze food as a critical site of powerful ideological production. I analyze media texts (via textual analysis, political economy, and audience reception) from the 1950s to the 2020s to illustrate the ways that an American taste for Asian/American capital is scripted in gustatory terms. Throughout history, Asian/American culinary capital has looked differently, been consumed differently, and been legible and illegible based on structures of power and U.S. global relations. Asian/American subjects navigate these structures of power and gain access to capital through the discursive and material production of Asian/American food. However, my approach to understanding the increased valorization of umami as Asian/American cultural capital is not to simply celebrate the successes of Asian/American chefs, food experts, and food. My research is ultimately in the service of critiquing American neoliberal multiculturalism and the way that umami is mobilized within it.