Book Club: Session 4

Join the Active Cultures Book Club for our fourth session, where we’ll be discussing Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures (2022) by Anita Mannur

In Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures, Anita Mannur examines how cooking and eating shape forms of intimacy, belonging, and political life. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and queer theory, Mannur introduces the concept of “intimate eating publics”—spaces where marginalized subjects gather through food, blurring the boundaries between public and private life. Moving across film, literature, television, and performance art, she traces how racialized South Asian and Arab bodies become visible within culinary cultures and how shared acts of cooking and eating produce new forms of kinship and community. Through these encounters, the book rethinks food as a site where race, migration, gender, and social connection are negotiated and where alternative futures of collective life can emerge.

The Book Club is free and open to all. Sign up below to receive our Book Club communications, which include full location details prior to each session.