Lily is currently working on two long-term research projects.
FARM TO FUTURE: HERITAGE FOOD REVIVAL ACROSS THREE CONTINENTS
Farm to Future: Heritage Food Revivals Across Three Continents uses ethnography and discourse analysis to profile three heritage food revival movements across three continents: the New Southern Food Movement, New Nordic Cuisine, and the burgeoning Indian Food Movement celebrating regional and indigenous Indian foodways. While these heritage food revivals celebrate and market increasingly specific targets of seasonality and locality, these restaurants and cookbooks also destabilize the very notions of time and place. Drawing on theories from performance studies, I demonstrate the tension between invented and material pasts at work in these culinary revivals. Likewise, I show how even the concept of "the local" is performatively contructed within a globalized fine dining ecosystem. These chefs and cookbook authors succeed in imagining a "future of food" based on heritage rather than from a lab. But I ultimately caution that in doing so, these culinary professionals tend to erase those communities who traditionally kept these foodways alive-- in my case studies, Black Southerners, indigenous Sami women, and low-caste farmers.
Sections of this research have been published in Food, Culture and Society, Southern Quarterly, Paragrana, and are forthcoming in the edited volume Pop Nostalgia (Palgrave).
SOIL AND BLOOD: PERFORMANCE MATERIALS IN CRISIS IN MIGRATORY EUROPE
This research project is rooted in my years of experience as a theater critic in Berlin. In 2014-2017, as a historic number of asylum seekers arrived and made their homes in Berlin, the marginalized “postmigrant” theater movement became mainstream. For example, the state-funded Gorki Theater became home to the “Exile Ensemble,” a group of refugee actors and directors hired to produce works in their main season; the Schaubühne worked closely with the group Refugee Impulse Club. At the same time, I was struggling to articulate the critical race theory I studied in my Ph.D. program in a German context. I co-founded the working group, “Approaches to Structural Racism” at the JFK Institute for American Studies in Berlin. Together, we worked to support M.A. and Ph.D. students with an interest in critical race theory despite a lack of institutional support for projects in this field. My second book project, Soil and Blood: Performance Materials in Crisis in Migratory Europe, is both embedded in and a critique of the field of German postmigratory theater studies, arguing for the necessity of a critical race discourse in German theater studies as well as in German culture more broadly. In Soil and Blood, I read German artists of color who use blood and soil as performance materials as vanguard critics of German “post-racialism.”
Sections of this research have been published in Performance Research, European Stages, and are forthcoming in TDR.
FARM TO FUTURE: HERITAGE FOOD REVIVAL ACROSS THREE CONTINENTS
Farm to Future: Heritage Food Revivals Across Three Continents uses ethnography and discourse analysis to profile three heritage food revival movements across three continents: the New Southern Food Movement, New Nordic Cuisine, and the burgeoning Indian Food Movement celebrating regional and indigenous Indian foodways. While these heritage food revivals celebrate and market increasingly specific targets of seasonality and locality, these restaurants and cookbooks also destabilize the very notions of time and place. Drawing on theories from performance studies, I demonstrate the tension between invented and material pasts at work in these culinary revivals. Likewise, I show how even the concept of "the local" is performatively contructed within a globalized fine dining ecosystem. These chefs and cookbook authors succeed in imagining a "future of food" based on heritage rather than from a lab. But I ultimately caution that in doing so, these culinary professionals tend to erase those communities who traditionally kept these foodways alive-- in my case studies, Black Southerners, indigenous Sami women, and low-caste farmers.
Sections of this research have been published in Food, Culture and Society, Southern Quarterly, Paragrana, and are forthcoming in the edited volume Pop Nostalgia (Palgrave).
SOIL AND BLOOD: PERFORMANCE MATERIALS IN CRISIS IN MIGRATORY EUROPE
This research project is rooted in my years of experience as a theater critic in Berlin. In 2014-2017, as a historic number of asylum seekers arrived and made their homes in Berlin, the marginalized “postmigrant” theater movement became mainstream. For example, the state-funded Gorki Theater became home to the “Exile Ensemble,” a group of refugee actors and directors hired to produce works in their main season; the Schaubühne worked closely with the group Refugee Impulse Club. At the same time, I was struggling to articulate the critical race theory I studied in my Ph.D. program in a German context. I co-founded the working group, “Approaches to Structural Racism” at the JFK Institute for American Studies in Berlin. Together, we worked to support M.A. and Ph.D. students with an interest in critical race theory despite a lack of institutional support for projects in this field. My second book project, Soil and Blood: Performance Materials in Crisis in Migratory Europe, is both embedded in and a critique of the field of German postmigratory theater studies, arguing for the necessity of a critical race discourse in German theater studies as well as in German culture more broadly. In Soil and Blood, I read German artists of color who use blood and soil as performance materials as vanguard critics of German “post-racialism.”
Sections of this research have been published in Performance Research, European Stages, and are forthcoming in TDR.
