This talk presents work-in-progress that weaves the political, personal, and sensory through a sustained meditation on hands. Beginning from her experience of chronic dyshidrotic eczema—an illness that disrupted her ability to type, cook, and eat— Anita Mannur reflects on tactility as a condition of being in the world. Moving across literary texts, cookbooks, film, children’s literature, and contemporary political culture, she examines how hands function as sites of labor, care, pleasure, stigma, and racialization within the South Asian diaspora. From culinary vocabularies that privilege “palmfuls” and “pinches,” to the backlash against Zohran Mamdani for eating biryani with his hands, she argues that hand-eating is a charged cultural act through which belonging, civility, and power are policed. Attending to a range of South Asian cultural work, the talk foregrounds hands as aesthetic and epistemological forms that reveal how race, gender, disability, and migration are lived at the level of the body.

Anita Mannur is director of the Asia, Pacific, and Diaspora Studies and professor of critical race, gender, and culture studies. Her research areas are Asian American literature, food studies, transnational South Asia, fashion studies, and race and gender studies. She is the author of Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture and Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures.