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Examining the racial underpinnings of food, microbial medicine, and disgust in America

 

American Disgust shows how perceptions of disgust and fears of contamination are rooted in the country’s history of colonialism and racism. Drawing on colonial, corporate, and medical archives, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer argues that microbial medicine is closely entwined with changing cultural experiences of digestion, excrement, and disgust that are inextricably tied to the creation of whiteness. 

Ranging from nineteenth-century colonial encounters with Native people to John Harvey Kellogg’s ideas around civilization and bowel movements to mid-twentieth-century diet and parenting advice books, Wolf-Meyer analyzes how embedded racist histories of digestion and disgust permeate contemporary debates around fecal microbial transplants and other bacteriotherapeutic treatments for gastrointestinal disease.

At its core, American Disgust wrestles with how changing cultural notions of digestion—what goes into the body and what comes out of it—create and impose racial categories motivated by feelings of disgust rooted in American settler-colonial racism. It shows how disgust is a changing, yet fundamental, aspect of American subjectivity and that engaging with it—personally, politically, and theoretically—opens up possibilities for conceptualizing health at the individual, societal, and planetary levels.

Anti-Korea investigates the rise of anti-Korean sentiment across East Asia, exploring how trending anti-Korean discourse both reflects and generates anxieties around Korea’s ascendant cultural and economic presence in the region. Moving beyond traditional international relations perspective, the book examines anti-Koreanism as a dynamic and evolving set of practices that operate through different modalities and manifest across multiple scales of affect, media circulation, and cultural production. By highlighting aversion, Anti-Korea demonstrates how Korea’s shift from a peripheral nation to a subimperial power reshapes regional cultural politics and transforms the very relations between culture and geopolitics. The book also offers a vital counterpoint to the global success and celebration of Korean popular culture by shifting the focus to the aversion it provokes, revealing how unresolved colonial legacies continue to fuel antagonisms and produce new fractures in contemporary East Asian media culture