Foodways as Borderlands: Identity and Culture in The Barbarians Are Coming

Abstract

This paper examines how foodways-taste preferences, eating habits, and culinary practices-function as borderlands that shape racial, ethnic, and class identities in David Wong Louie’s The Barbarians Are Coming. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of distinction and Guillermo Verdecchia’s concept of borderlands, it explores how the protagonist Sterling Lung’s culinary journey reveals tensions between assimilation and cultural memory. By analyzing food as a semiotic system of class and cultural hierarchy, the study argues that foodways delineate imaginary homelands and social boundaries that both constrain and define identity formation in diasporic contexts.