Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America

You are invited to attend this special book talk

Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America

presented by

Mark Padoongpatt

Associate Professor, Asian and Asian American Studies, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

UCLA Institute of American Cultures Visiting Scholar 2016-17

Thursday, April 26, 2018

12:00 - 1:30 pm

UCLA Powell Library – East Rotunda

Book Description

With a uniquely balanced combination of salty, sweet, sour, and spicy flavors, Thai food burst onto Los Angeles’s and America’s culinary scene in the 1980s. Flavors of Empire examines the rise of Thai food and the way it shaped the racial and ethnic contours of Thai American identity and community. Full of vivid oral histories and new archival material, this book explores the factors that made foodways central to the Thai American experience. Starting with American Cold War intervention in Thailand, Mark Padoongpatt traces how informal empire allowed U.S. citizens to discover Thai cuisine abroad and introduce it inside the United States. When Thais arrived in Los Angeles, they reinvented and repackaged Thai food in various ways to meet the rising popularity of the cuisine in urban and suburban spaces. Padoongpatt opens up the history and politics of Thai food for the first time, all while demonstrating how race emerges in seemingly mundane and unexpected places.

Book will be available for purchase and signing

Refreshments will be served

RSVP to https://foodthaiamerica.eventbrite.com

Sponsored by

UCLA Library, Asian American Studies Center, History Department, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Thai Community Development Center