Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

I've been terrible about posting these round-ups of my reading so forgive me if I spam a little as I catch up with everything I've read for this challenge this year.

Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies by Najmieh Batmanglij and My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking Niloufer Ichaporia King
Two very different books about diaspora Parsi cooking. Batmanglij is talking primarily about the American diaspora, and King is living in America, but her food culture is the culture of Parsis who live in India. Reading them within a month or so of each other, I could see where they were coming from the same place filtered through two different foodways, and where they totally differ (King, for example, has a whole section on the food of the 1950s dinner party, Parsis-in-India edition; whereas Batmanglij occasionally offers ways to alter recipes to make them more accurate to medieval originals). Both of them you could easily cook from in North America and I fully intend to. I preferred the Batmanglij for thoroughness and the perspective that I rarely see in books aimed at a North American audience: namely, the bits aimed at Iranians who are interested in their own heritage. For example, she writes about how to create a festival meal assuming that you are attempting to return to celebrations remembered from childhood, not someone from a different culture who doesn't know what the festival in question is, though she does include several short summaries of Persian/Iranian cultural information, including poetry. King's book is more of a memoir, if you prefer that sort of cookbook, and it is a memoir of a very particular Indian sub-culture, which might be of interest. I would recommend both.

We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women's Coming-of-Age Ceremonies by Cutcha Risling Baldy
This is a serious and academic work of anthropology that genuinely made me cry. Risling Baldy is a Hupa academic who was personally involved in bringing back the women's coming-of-age ceremonies after the settler government attempted to eradicate them, and she writes about their meaning both metaphysically and what they mean to the people involved (both the women performing the ceremony for the girl coming of age and the girl herself.) I would press this book aggressively on anyone who wants to write anything about ritual and ceremony because it does such an amazing job of explaining not just what people believe, but also why they care. I'd recommend it to anyone: the writing is not academese at all, and the perspective is so important.

High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America by Jessica B. Harris
An excellent book about how African-American foodways are strongly related to African ones, tracing the journey across the Atlantic as well as how they mutated within America. Suffered only from the fact that I had already read Michael Twitty's book on the same subject (The Cooking Gene) which is just a tiny bit more thorough and slightly better. But an enjoyable book all the same and of interest if you're interested in the topic.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh
Ghosh asks the question of why artists are failing to deal with climate change in their art. For example, very few novels include the happenstance of the extreme weather events that are increasingly common and yet mimetic realistic novels should, even if they're about something else. His concern is that humans won't be able to imagine climate change unless we can see it imagined for us already in art, and if we can't imagine it, we won't do anything about it. Lots of interesting ideas in one short volume, highly recommended.

Food from the Radical Center: Healing Our Land and Communities by Gary Paul Nabhan
Nabhan suggests several methods of community organizing centred around food production, particularly things that can be done at the small scale. Interesting, but I find it difficult to remember months later.

Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging by Minh-ha T. Pham
Pham is looking at how Asian "Influencers" are both linked and not linked to the ongoing history of Asian involvement in the garment industry, as well as how racism affects these influencers' reception by the fashion industry. I didn't know anything about these style bloggers beforehand (though I believe that they're quite famous to other people), but I love me some labour history and this book does an excellent job of laying out the labour involved in style blogging and internet content creation more generally, and discussing how it is and is not received as labour. This is a more abstruse academic book, but if you're interested in labour history and new forms of work, I'd recommend it.