Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Charles T. Lee (Arizona State University)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399557399

ISBN 10:   1399557394
Pages:   264
Publication Date:   31 March 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Transformation Is in the Details: Ethnic Food, Immigrant lives, and the Art of Elastic Politics in Neoliberal Times Part I: Elastic Food 1. Strategic Posthumanism: Happy Objects, Affective Economy, and Reanimating Citizenship Life 2. The Posthuman Politics of Happy Objects: From the Mystery of the Chinese Chop Suey to the Renaissance of the Korean Soft Tofu Stew Part II: Elastic Citizenship 3. Of “626” and “Bobalife”: Ethnoburbs, Transnational Asian Material Culture, and Reinventing the Right to the City in the Age of Multiracial Neoliberalism 4. Elastic Citizenship Through Asian Restaurants in SoCal: The Triangular Improvisation of Nonexistent Rights via Ethnic Entrepreneurship, Labor, and Consumption in Everyday Life Part III: Elastic Governance 5. A Quasi-Sovereignty That Is Illusive but Real: Market, Civil Society, and Toward a Left Art of Elastic Governance 6. Redesigning Reforms in the Threshold Space between Mainstream Reform and Radical Abolition: State, Posthuman Attachment, and the Elastic Recrafting of Rights Bibliography Index

Reviews

Using the proliferation and material culture of Asian restaurants in Southern California as a case study, this book lays out what the author calls the art of elastic politics, where ‘resistance’ is not simply oppositional but takes on non-linear, circuitous and ‘elastic’ forms of being political in the everyday. This is a major intervention in political theory, inviting us to rethink democracy, citizenship, rights, power and governance in the era of multiracial neoliberalism. A hugely inspiring read! -- Ien Ang, Western Sydney University

Using the proliferation and material culture of Asian restaurants in Southern California as a case study, this book lays out what the author calls The Art of Elastic Politics, where ‘resistance’ is not simply oppositional but takes on non-linear, circuitous and ‘elastic’ forms of being political in the everyday. This is a major intervention in political theory, inviting us to rethink democracy, citizenship, rights, power and governance in the era of multiracial neoliberalism. A hugely inspiring read! -- Ien Ang, Western Sydney University Bridging new materialism, ethnic studies, and food studies, The Art of Elastic Politics combines political theory with ethnographic fieldwork in Asian restaurants to offer a powerful framework for understanding how power, resistance, and social change operate in our interconnected, commodified world. Essential reading for how citizenship, belonging, and political change are being remade in twenty-first century America. -- Cristina Beltrán, New York University

Author Information

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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