Paper short abstract:

Drawing on new materialism and my fieldwork on Asian restaurants in California, this paper examines how the instrumental relations between immigrants (subjects), ethnic food (objects), and the restaurant setting/aura (environment) engender subtle and ambiguous political effects in global capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

Current literature on new materialism tends to adopt an ethos of “democratic non-instrumentality” that renders a linear political trajectory of matter and objects that is detached from the instrumental effects of global capitalism. Drawing on my fieldwork on the Asian restaurant industry in Southern California (USA), this paper examines how the instrumental relations between immigrants (subjects), ethnic food (objects), and the restaurant setting/aura (environment) engender subtle and ambiguous political effects. This constellation of what I call “elastic instrumentality” in ethnic restaurants (composed of the triadic elements of posthumanist co-enactment, affective economy, and culturally vibrant biosociality) enables immigrants to improvise their “citizenly contributions” and “nonexistent rights” (i.e., rights that are not yet existing or codified in law such as the rights to enterprise, work, consumption, residency, affective inclusion, biological wellbeing, and sociocultural belong) in imperceptible and circuitous ways, signaling a complex and protean formation of posthumanist politics in global capitalism. Calling this immigrant improvisation “elastic citizenship,” the paper argues that the uncovering of this fluid and complex dynamic helps stretch and expand our conception of the posthumanist political horizon in terms of the agents of politics (e.g., including immigrant restaurateurs, cooks, bussers, dishwashers, servers, customers, ethnic food, culinary ingredients, ethnic cookware and utensils), the sites of politics (e.g., including ethnic-based commercial establishments), and the ways of being political (e.g., including the everyday practices of producing and consuming ethnic food).