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

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.