Student Daily Digest

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5  / 4PM 

STERN LOUNGE – Austin 216 

"The Tiffin Box, Epistolarity & Intimate Failure"  

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC  

Sponsored by the Asian/ Asian American Studies Institute 

This talk examines the value of turning to visual culture to reimagine gender roles within the context of gendered household economy. Professor Mannur focuses her analysis on Ritesh Batra’s 2013 film THE LUNCHBOX, which was a contender for India’s official nomination to the Oscar foreign film award, to ask what productive intimacies might emerge in the spaces through which human error and fallibility fail to secure the kinds of intimacies that the “dabbawalla” (India’s lunch delivery system) is designed to broker, and to suggest reinserting the place of the female in the domestic space. 

Anita Mannur is associate professor of English at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture and co-editor of Theorizing Diaspora and Eating Asian America. She has been the editor of the Journal of Asian American Studies since 2014. Her work appears in a number of journals and edited collections. She is currently completing a book titled Sensory Publics: The Culinary Politics of Intimacy.