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An insightful map of the landscape of social meals, this book argues that the ways in which Americans eat together play a central role in social life in the United States. Delving into a wide range of research, the author analyzes etiquette and entertaining books from the past century and conducts interviews and observations of dozens of African American and non-ethnic white hosts and guests at dinner parties, potlucks, and buffets. It finds that when people invite friends, neighbors, or family members to share meals within their households, social inequalities involving race, economics, and gender reveal themselves in interesting ways: relationships are defined, boundaries of intimacy or distance are set, and people find themselves either excluded or included. The book focuses on one particular type of sociable activity, the shared meal—and more narrowly, the shared meal that occurs in households and includes non-kin. It explores some of the moral discourses and texts that shape our understanding of food and social life in the United States.

Often thought of as a solitary activity, the practice of reading can in fact encode the complex politics of community formation. Engagement with literary culture represents a particularly integral facet of identity formation—and expresses of a sense of belonging—within the South Asian diaspora in the United States. This book blends a case study with literary and textual analysis to illuminate this phenomenon. The book's investigation considers institutions from literary reviews to the marketplace to social media and other technologies, as well as traditional forms of literary discussion like book clubs and academic criticism. Throughout the book questions how its subjects' circumstances, desires, and shared race and class, limit the values they ascribe to reading. It also examines how ideology circulating around a body of literature or a self-selected, imagined community of readers shapes reading itself and influences South Asians' powerful, if contradictory, relationship with ideals of cultural authenticity.