"Ang Sarap, Sarap!"
Open Access DepositedFilipinx American Culinary Imaginaries and Diasporic Gastropoetics
My dissertation examines the racialized and gendered rhetoric of Filipino and Filipino American eating cultures of the 20th- and 21st-centuries. Drawing on postcards, colonial photography, cookbooks, recipes, menus, and a Filipino American novel, I argue that Filipino foodways have been a significant cultural battleground serving both U.S. imperialist interest in the Philippines and diasporic Filipinx Americans’ efforts to establish postcolonial life. My project examines the unruly bounds of “domesticity” and transnational ideas of home. By understanding how ethnic cuisines are rhetorically constructed through “culinary imaginaries,” the racialized, gendered, sexualized, disabling, and classed fantasy productions of foodways, we gain insight on how the biopolitics of the U.S. racial state can be expressed through mundane alimentary acts. Moreover, we uncover how diasporic migrants can challenge, invest in, or reproduce gendered fictions of the nation-state through cultural and culinary work.Moving from American colonial-era kitchens in the Philippines to contemporary diasporic kitchens of Filipinx Americans, I organize the dissertation into a series of case studies. The consumption of food-focused colonial imagery enabled a visual language that augmented American travelers’ written accounts of the Philippines and justified imperial intervention (Chapter 1). Under the guise of Progressive Era domestic science, white women’s travel narratives constructed the “tropical kitchen” as biohazardous site of domestic danger. Then post-independence, encyclopedic “Oriental” cookbooks transformed this culinary imaginary of the Philippine kitchen to a multicultural site of paradise (Chapter 2). In their attempts to make knowable “Filipino American cuisine,” diasporic Filipina chef-authors used the formal conventions of the cookbook to demonstrate the struggles of maintaining cultural heritage in the U.S. (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 interrogates how American-born Filipino chef-authors contend with cultural conceptions of Filipino Americanness rooted in racialized and gendered stereotyping. I conclude with an analysis of Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart that highlights processes of queer homemaking that go beyond compulsory systems of able-bodiedness and heteronormativity (Chapter 5). Ultimately, I contend that definitions of Filipinoness and Filipino Americanness were actively being formulated and are continuously negotiated in the kitchen. Described in gastropoetics, the kitchen serves as an alternative archive, experimental laboratory, and cultural battleground for chef-authors.
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Sevillano_gwu_0075A_17380.pdf | 2025-12-12 | Open Access |
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