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TALK BY Dr. Athia Choudhury: The Making of the American Calorie and Metabolic Metrics of Empire

The calorie is everywhere. Its numeric value supposes a neutrality which informs personal choices, nutritional guidelines, supplementary food programs, military rations– all of which outline what the citizen-body needs and looks like. This talk uncovers the racial life of the American calorie by tracking practices of energy management and bodily discipline from U.S. military outposts to a range of domestic colonial reform projects in Asia and the Pacific. Offering an object oriented history of bipower through the calorie, this talk illuminates 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.

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 previously held an appointment as the Postdoctoral Associate in Asian American and Diaspora Studies at Duke University. She 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.