Toward a Relational Foodscape in Chinese and Japanese North American Literature adopts a relational perspective of food justice to reread literary texts, mainly by contemporary Chinese and Japanese American/Canadian writers. The book highlights that the environment and race are closely intertwined in Asian North American ecocriticism. Yiyi He demonstrates how a food justice ecocritical lens informed by the East Asian (especially Chinese) notion “relational foodscape” challenges the binary between humans and more-than-humans while emphasizing relations and reciprocity between them. Yiyi He applies it to interpret selected texts, such as Rita Wong’s forage and undercurrent, Ava Chin’s Eating Wildly, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms, Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, David Mas Masumoto’s Epitaph for a Peach, Rita Wong and Fred Wah’s beholden: a poem as long as the river, to break all kinds of binaries, such as nature/culture, rural/urban, East/West, humans/more-than-humans. “Relational Foodscape” is a concept embracing both Asian and Western relational philosophies, which echoes the material turn and promotes food justice, especially for racialized and marginalized groups and communities. Approaching relational foodways in theory and practice provides an alternative to reconsider and redirect issues of race, class, and even multispecies relations.

Dr Yiyi He received her Ph. D. from the interdisciplinary Graduate Program of Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. She attained her Master’s degree from the Foreign Languages and Cultures Department at Fudan University, Shanghai. Her research mostly engages in a critical dialogue between contemporary environmental writing and ecocriticism in China and the Asian North American context, to promote knowledge mobility in general, and international ecocritical dialogue in particular, between East and West, with a focus on the intersection of the environment and race as represented in literary works. Dr He’s research interests include ecocriticism, Asian North American literature, comparative literature, and cultural studies. She has published articles in both Chinese and English, such as in A&HCI, Scopus, and CSSCI journals. She currently teaches English language and literature at Sichuan International Studies University (SISU), Chongqing, the People’s Republic of China.