Self, Other and Us: Food in Travel Accounts of Sino-French Encounters in the 16th to 18th centuries

My dissertation seeks to study how French and Chinese images of each other through the lens of food informed Sino-French encounters from the late 16th to the mid-18th centuries. It dissects representations of food authored by French and Chinese intermediaries in order to study the relationships between knowledge production, identity and imperial power politics that undergirded Sino-French encounters before the European power dominance by the mid-late 18th century. My dissertation will explore how food served as a crucial medium of the early Sino-French encounters by anatomizing the interlocking mechanics that informed how various aspects of the encounters, such as science, linguistics, culture, society and politics, operated together to construct images of the Other through food. Such intertwined interactions constituted the early Sino-French encounters.