University of Hawai‛i at Mānoa – “The Making of the American Calorie and Settler Wellness”
Event Details:
May 1, 2025 @ 3pm PST/12pm HST on Zoom
About the lecture:
The calorie is everywhere. Its numeric value supposes a neutrality which informs personal choices, nutritional guidelines, supplementary food programs, military rations and foreign aid packages– all of which outline what the citizen-body needs and looks like. This talk uncovers the racial life of the American calorie, tracking practices of energy management and bodily discipline from U.S. military outposts to a range of colonial reform projects that used calories as a tool to frame responsible eating through the domestic practices of the new American woman during the 20th century. More broadly, by offering an object oriented history of biopower through the calorie, this talk interrogates how wellness and diet culture become major ideological exports of U.S. empire that produce global consumers whose nutritional and medical decisions become racially coded and gendered.
About Athia N. Choudhury, Ph.D:
Athia N. Choudhury is a writer, cultural theorist, and feminist educator specializing in Asian American feminisms, 20th century body politics, and militarized food cultures. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity with a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Southern California. Athia is currently an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Disability Studies jointly appointed in the dept. of American Studies and the Science, Technology, & Society program at Brown University. In Fall of 2025, Athia will join the University of California, Davis as an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies.