Chop suey surplus: Chinese food, sex, and the political economy of Afro-Asia

Abstract

This essay traces the forgotten hemispheric Afro-Chinese political economy of race and desire in the Americas through chop suey as an analytic during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Post-abolition Asian indentured laborers occupied the colonial plantation, and so Chinese and Indian food was cooked and eaten in these spaces. Chop suey the Cantonese overseas dish, an amalgam of stir-fried vegetables and proteins, was adapted to local palates with substituted ingredients. New cuisines, new foodways, and new subjects, people of African and Asian descent, emerged out of the of the interracial entanglement of racial slavery and indenture after emancipation. Chop suey, a trope used time and again by multiculturalism masks a deeper history of Afro-Asian women’s sexuality. The Chinese American dish developed out of a logic of substitution and improvization that I extend to the ways the Black woman became the understudy for the absent Chinese woman in the Americas. The indeterminate genealogy of chop suey poses a critique of the rhetoric of authenticity and hybridity. In acts of performance from Broadway musicals to Hollywood cinema to the Harlem Renaissance to West Indian beauty pageantry, I trace the relational contingency of Black and Chinese women’s sexuality and labors. From New York City to the Mississippi Delta to Jamaica, chop suey illuminates how race, immigration, and desire are enmeshed through Afro-Chinese femininity in the Americas. The Afro-Chinese woman has been consumed as chop suey but remains undigested, in surplus value, through the conceptual metaphors that equate sex with eating that are often projected onto women’s bodies.