The Great American Recipe
The aesthetic of hardship used in Ancestors in the Americas provides an ideological spectacle, one that masks more complex realities in favor of essentialist sympathies. In its righteous revisionist pursuit of anti-racism, it devotes aesthetic energy towards upholding the settler colonial state, an ideological project alive and well in modern-day PBS. If anything, recent protests from filmmakers of color struggling for funding amid the diminished influence of ITVS and the Minority Consortia suggest that PBS is losing even its anti-racist edge (Deggins, 2021). In this light, the TV series The Great American Recipe, an “uplifting cooking competition that celebrates the multiculturalism that makes American food unique and iconic” (PBS, n.d., para. 1), which aired its second season in 2023, reveals PBS’s current ideological orientation—an unthreatening liberalism where confrontation and conflict do not exist. Any acknowledgement of history and racism gets individualized, narrated as subjective family memories to be cherished instead of traumas to be reckoned with.
The way PBS achieves its multicultural utopia has been reconfigured into narratives that maintain an already existing harmonious status quo instead of ones that fight to correct the injustices preventing an ideal America. The cast of The Great American Recipe consist of a carefully assembled ethnic smorgasbord. Thus, for Season 2 Episode 6, the host is Puerto Rican Alejandra; Filipina and Jewish Leah, white Graham, and Black Tiffany make up the panel of judges; and the contestants are Greek Ted, Jewish Abbe and Brad, Caribbean Leanna, Native American Maria, Guyanese Salmah, Native Hawaiian Relle, and Khela, who describes herself as simply “from the Midwest” (7:20). Salmah wins the episode with her mithai, a dessert “brought from India to Guyana from my grandmother’s great-grandmother,” (37:20) making her the latest of “a long line of ladies who are famous for their mithai,” (28:30) an encapsulation of her “family legacy” (46:20).
In fact, mithai is also the legacy of hundreds of thousands of Indians who arrived in British Guiana as indentured servants replacing freed slaves for planters desperate for a laboring underclass whom they could dominate (Rabe, 2005). Those who could work were routinely worked to death, and those who did not do fieldwork faced rape and murderous pogroms, a pattern that continued after independence and to this very day, owing to the race-baiting Forbes Burnham dictatorship. Political and cultural leaders who called for the Black and Indian working classes to join hands, like Walter Rodney, were assassinated. Yet, as celebrated in this television program, the dish mithai survived in Caribbean cuisine against all odds. The larger history is not even alluded to in The Great American Recipe, perhaps because it would complicate its rose-tinted view of the U.S. state, which backed Forbes Burnham (Rabe, 2005). Instead, the judges speak of how they “loved the story” as they “experience new flavors” (52:30) when they explain their choice of winner, localizing its significance to a family story.
As in Ancestors in the Americas, the two indigenous contestants melt into an undifferentiated stew with the other people of color. However, The Great American Recipe does this through showcasing difference, not similarity. The indigenous contestants’ costumes are visibly different, with Maria sporting beadwork earrings and Relle wearing flowers in her hair, both signs of pride in their unique cultural identities. But for Veracini (2011), this imagery reinvigorates the settler colonial project:
“Alas, as the politics of indigenous recognition and reconciliation institute a framework designed to manage and neutralize indigenous difference, the new dispensation primarily promotes the domestication of indigenous sovereignties for the benefit of the settler state” (p. 8).
As Maria and Relle enthusiastically explain how their cuisine and culture are unique, their enthusiasm also supports the “Great America” that occupies their land; they do not just participate in the settler colonial state but become its poster child. The contestants compete to be featured on a cover of a Great American Recipe cookbook. Their cultures are presented as equally illustrious and important, with no distinction between settler and native. All make equal claim to America, so indigenous culture is simply one dish in a bountiful spread where each part makes the settler colonial state even more delicious. More importantly, all the dishes are presented as pairing well together, strengthening the ideological project of settler colonial nationhood. A wide shot at 1:48 uses mise-en-scene to emphasize the cohesion of the contestants as they walk towards the competition building set against the Virginia countryside. The entire imagined community walks as a tightly bunched whole, occupying just one-tenth of the horizontal space of the shot and less than one-fifth of the vertical space. The episode ends as it began, with pure harmony. Khela and Salmah hug each other in the final shot in the competition space, an interracial reconciliation that makes no distinction between colonizer and any kind of colonized (53:20).
As in Ancestors in the Americas, affective imagery becomes crucial to reaching ideological ends. The opening sequence, for instance, is 70 seconds of resplendent ideological spectacle. It begins with the camera tracking and panning above a long table filled with plates of food shared by the cast (0:30) while a narrator begins to announce that “this is the Great American Recipe.” This voiceover is used as a sound bridge, cutting to Tiffany, Leah, and Alejandra laughing. Later in the sequence, Graham makes the nationalist intent clear when he reflects, “this shows us what we are all about, the great American recipe highlighting all the diversity” (1:05) between shots of contestants and judges with tears flowing down their faces, moved by the stories of family history and traditions. The sequence culminates in shots of supportive elation, applause, and excitement for the winners (1:25), completing the full gamut of emotions, all explicitly tied to the U.S. state.
The emotional arc of the opening sequence presages the use of affective imagery to indicate the episode’s narrative structure. Episode 6 is split into two challenges, each a performance of multicultural relationality occupying around half the episode. Each challenge requires contestants to delve into their own family traditions while learning from the cultures of the other contestants in a three-part process:
- the host and judges introduce the challenge,
- the contestants struggle and support each other as they complete the challenge,
- all the contestants triumph in the end.
Even the less successful dishes provide a deeper appreciation for other cultures and family stories. For example, roughly halfway through the first challenge, Khela begins to cry when she tastes how Salmah used a Caribbean technique to improve the chili she made for her deceased father. It is an emotional climax for the challenge, a sudden affective escalation that pierces through otherwise emotionally neutral scenes of contestants cooking, joking, and learning about the dishes. During the judging, the chili is tasted last, giving a recapitulation of bittersweet memories, along with Khela’s tears, a privileged narrative position at the close of the first half of the episode. The last three shots of the first challenge are of Salmah running back towards Khela, embracing her, and swaying back and forth. Other contestants join in the hug, each at a successively closer shot scale, rhyming with a similar hug that closes the second challenge and the episode. The lesson imparted is that cultural exchange is emotionally charged but ultimately orderly and uncomplicatedly wholesome.
Although difficult to classify as Asian American media in its strictest senses, Asian Americans are a prominent part of The Great American Recipe on and off the screen. Asian Americans are among the show’s producers, for instance, and Filipina American judge Leah is one of its most salient presences. Here Leah praises Leanna’s cou-cou and snapper as “Barbados in a bowl” (48:35). The dish, for Leah, would not be as good without Leanna’s identity and immigrant family story, a particularly literal example of bell hooks’s (2015/1992) charge that “[w]ithin commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice” (p. 21). There is an Othering reductionism in Leah’s quip: through the rules of commodity culture, multifaceted Barbados gets reduced to a bowl of food, and the expansive Afro-Caribbean history of cou-cou gets reduced to the limited territory of Barbados. Indeed, the premise of the show rests on each dish serving as an authentic representative of a delimited culture, a concept critiqued by Martin F. Manalansan IV (2013) as “a kind of constructed ‘settled-ness’” that denies actual subjects’ porous negotiation of identity through history and conflicting, complex experiences (p. 297). For Vijay Prashad (2001), multiculturalism itself needs the concept of authenticity since it relies on “an idea of culture wherein culture is bounded into authentic zones” (p. 61). Multiculturalism’s use for nationalist ends is not incidental, as the concept of multiculuralism always defers to a benevolent central authority under which diverse people unify:
“Multiculturalism is a principle for the regulation of social life from above, one that can only fitfully find itself in the sorts of struggles that produce the values of interaction from below” (Prashad, 2001, p. 40).
Both Manalansan and Prashad view these tendencies of multiculturalism as something to be resisted, with Prashad, drawing from earlier work by Robin D. G. Kelley, proposing an alternative: polyculturalism. On one hand, polyculturalism defends the living history of culture against its completion, rejecting a “static view. . . with cultures already forged” (Prashad, 2001, p. 66). Cultural boundaries become understood as constructed, with each supposedly discrete culture the product of a continuous process of hybridity and exchange with other cultures. On the other hand, the concept of polyculturalism indicates a radical, aspirational proposal of cultural relationality forged through actual acts of solidarity, a bottom-up model for structuring society. Diversity does not come as something received from the state, but something gained through inhabiting the same spaces, learned through communion and disagreement, and built through struggling with each other against both common and unique enemies. As a bottom-up model, it is always messy, incomplete, and completely unfetishized, acknowledging all cultures’ equal beauty and ugliness.
Terminal USA
Terminal USA is all of those things. The ITVS-financed film about a Japanese American family is filled with the abject and the scatalogical. In terms of its reception, a New York Times critic described it as “anarchic” upon its PBS premiere (Grimes, 1994, para. 1), while Okada (2015) retrospectively evaluated it as “a significant break in the tradition of injury, history, and memory in Asian American film and video made for public television” (p. 69). The film directly mocks the multicultural concept of culture as consisting of discrete objects to be preserved and appreciated by developing characters like Dad, a hypermasculine patriarch obsessed with purity. Dad receives racist death threats at his industrial job, but his absurd reaction focuses anger not on the death threat, but on his coworkers’ inability to discern between Chinese and Japanese:
“Jesus, I can’t believe they still think I’m a chink. I am not a chink, I’m a jap! We’re japs! Chink is not the same as jap, there’s a big, big difference” (12:00).
Dad’s three children, Kazumi, Marvin, and Holly, also read as parodies of positive, uplifting, and appreciative images of Asian Americans. Punk Kazumi and well-behaved mama’s boy Marvin are both played by director Jon Moritsugu, a nod to a ludicrous split personality between positive and negative Asian. Holly is an uncanny version of a perfect high school girl, a cheerleader with streamers atop curled hair, rhinestones adorning her clothes, and seven hairbands on one arm.
The three children are revealed to have hybrid identities, becoming more polycultural than multicultural. Unlike his father, Kazumi has no problem crossing the border between Japanese and Chinese, wryly replying to Marvin’s entreaty to go to a hospital with, “Confucius say, hospitals are for pussies” (36:20). His hedonistic, easy-come-easy-go lifestyle is more informed by his loyalty to the punk subculture than to any fundamentally Japanese or Asian American cultural values. Marvin appears to be the perfect model minority, but his secret attraction to skinhead men is just as important to him as his studying. In addition, the homophobia Marvin faces from his parents when they discover his sexuality is a frank, unfetishized treatment of Asian Americans’ capacity for bigotry. Holly’s identity is fractiously defined by relationships with her fellow cheerleaders, a purity-demanding Dad, an oafish white jock boyfriend Rex, and a manipulative sex predator Tom Sawyer the Lawyer. The contours of being Asian American undeniably influence the entire family, but this is depicted mainly through the pathology of racist stereotypes. Such stereotypes include the model minority myth in Marvin’s case and the submissive China doll in Holly’s case. Both characters suffer a total mental collapse at the end of the film after struggling with the dissonance between keeping up a stereotype and escaping to their true, hybrid self. Marvin pleads, “You’re here to take me away, right? You’re here to rescue me?” (52:35) when skinheads invade the home, and Holly ends the film by leaving home with Tom Sawyer the Lawyer.
Manalansan (2013) views rejecting authenticity to be an
“historically and cultural[ly] negotiated state and process of emotional discomfort and affective refusal to adhere to an easy mapping of identity.” (p. 297)
As such, Terminal USA is laden with affective imagery, but rather than evoking pathos, as in Ancestors in the Americas and Great American Recipe, the sounds and images are uncanny, irreverent, and rambunctious. Bursts of anger and screams of horror flaunt the aspect of spectacle, formally emphasized to bawdy effect and sometimes turned into visual gags. For example, a montage juxtaposes Holly’s screaming face being zoomed in and out on and shots of similar zooms on a burning cross. The film has many more examples of dialectical editing, but most take the form not of montage, but of scenes intercut for ironic effect. A scene of Dad asking Holly not to perform sex acts for Tom Sawyer the Lawyer is periodically interrupted by a scene where her mother promises sexual favors to a pizza delivery man.
Terminal USA does not explicitly name settler colonialism, but it invokes its cinematic expression. The iconography of the American settler enmeshes Holly and Dad as they try to conform to stereotypes, morphing their appearances with costumes reminiscent of the genre of the Western. As Holly embraces Tom Sawyer the Lawyer’s perversity and disobeys her father, she abandons her cheerleader outfit to adopt flamboyant red, white, and blue clothes, including a cowboy hat, boots, and toy guns. Her shirt and skirt now have long fringes reminiscent of the traditional clothing of the peoples indigenous to the Great Plains. But that attire that was also adopted by the frontiersman of what is now the Western United States and their perennially popular reenactments of their atrocities and killings of American Indians in “Wild West shows” that informed the Western as a  film genre (Benshoff & Griffin, 2009). In this way, Holly has fulfilled the China doll stereotype as she becomes fully, cartoonishly American, but a way of being American that is also indelibly tied to settler colonial violence and its glorification. A few minutes later, Dad, preparing to resort to violence to protect the family from impurity, retrieves a gun, and a cowboy hat materializes on his head (39:00). As an Asian American family, the characters in Terminal USA must negotiate between and beyond conflicting dualities that include not only untenable positive/negative stereotypes and the hybridization of two cultures, but also the narratives of the immigrant, with its histories of striving for prosperity in new lands through hardship, and the settler, with its histories of breaking generational bonds with land through violence and dispossession. The former narrative suggests a righteous multicultural enrichment, but pursuing it requires being folded into the latter’s legacy, unwittingly or not. Dad’s cowboy hat also unwittingly appears on his head, where he is without the hat in one shot and is wearing the hat in the next. Terminal USA, it develops into murderous delusions as Dad engages in a bloody rampage at the climax of the film.
ITVS and PBS paid dearly for their transgressive diversion from multiculturalism. Critics cited in the New York Times (Grimes, 1994) called Terminal USA and other ITVS programming “disappointing” (para. 11) and “so poorly made that they’re embarrassing for PBS to put on the air” (para. 19), glossing offensive content as low quality. Many stations refused to air the film, and outrage even reached Congress, where conservatives sought to cut or eliminate ITVS’s funding (Grimes, 1994). Such was the end of an experiment to “complicate simplistic notions of positive-image multiculturalism” (Okada, 2015, p. 65): the state simply could not sustain a polycultural threat to its control.
Complicating multiculturalism, in other words, means severing the settler colonial state’s strategy for managing difference. Anarchic Terminal USA accordingly opened a discursive space for challenges to settler colonial media. Just as the early Asian American media movement came to PBS for access to resources and distribution, Moritsugu’s path to PBS was motivated out of a need for financial stability. His previous film was a commercial failure, and he was working a minimum wage job when ITVS offered him $9,000 to submit a script and $365,000 to produce it (Stevenson, 2003). Unlike the Asian American media movement’s mainstream, however, Terminal USA refused to accede to PBS’s multicultural mandate but nonetheless sought to use PBS distribution to bring larger audiences and attention to a confrontational counternarrative. The contrast between this counternarrative and the revisionisms of Ancestors in the Americas and The Great American Recipe brings into sharp relief the organized Asian American media mainstream’s fraught cooperation with PBS for continued financial backing while also demonstrating a viable alternative for Asian American media making that does not resort to either state-supported institutionalization or commercial privatization.
Perhaps those Congressional conservatives were more genuinely protective of the U.S. state than their opponents gave them credit for: Terminal USA does name the state in its title, after all, and the image of that state it provides is an utter repudiation of “excellence within diversity.” By bending the ideological boundaries of PBS, the film is also a rebellion against a structure of the state that has legitimized settlers and their claims, rhetorically strengthened settler colonialism, and sidelined Native people as a manageable minority. That structure nurtured the Asian American media movement, and the Asian American media movement helped steer it in return; the history of Asian American media becomes complicated by its complicity.
Epilogue: Whither Asian American media?
“We constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness. For if we penetrate the object, we liberate it but destroy it; and if we acknowledge its full weight, we respect it, but restore it to a state which is still mystified.” (Barthes, 1972, p. 159)
In 2022, the Criterion Collection announced that they would be releasing Wayne Wang’s films Chan is Missing (1982) and Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985) for the former’s fortieth anniversary (Yu, 2022). Asian American media suddenly entered the canon. But no matter how many supplemental materials contextualizing the films’ creation and original reception come packaged with the disk, they are now given over as objects of cinephilia, sanctified with respect as fine art, and, thus, their original ideological impact is mystified. In fact, viewers of Chan is Missing in 1982 did not watch a flawless, restored Blu-ray. They “perched on the rickety chairs” at underground spaces amongst a tight-knit community of Asian American filmmakers and activists interested in building a movement, not just an art (Tajima, 1991, p. 10). In this light, the current “restoration” is a partial one, bringing back only the aesthetics without the revival of the radical Asian American politics that accompanied it. Undoubtedly, more classics of Asian American film and video will join Chan is Missing.
It was in part a reaction to this omission of radicality that I programmed Asian American Media in Winter 2023, a nine-week series of films and videos at Doc Films co-programmed with Tien-Tien Jong and co-sponsored with a grant from the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Resisting the rhetoric of the retrospective, I presented the screenings as a confrontational, critical, and politicized experience, staging introductions and teach-ins that tied the films’ content to political struggles happening in the city and world around us. Some films were counter-programmed against other films, and the dialectic of different styles and radical ideologies opened possibilities for conversation and strategizing. By refusing to sanctify the films under a unified narrative, we hoped that the spirit of the movement, full of self-critique and dissent, would be kept more intact than if the films were shown as singular masterpieces or otherwise artful objects. History and theory were combined with praxis, calling attention to action possibilities amidst a tumultuous municipal election where I served as precinct captain on two socialist City Council campaigns. The final screening was on election night, when our progressive coalition won a historic, hard-fought victory.
In closing, I clarify the intentions of this essay, which was developed from ideas in the Asian American Media series along with community and conversation with the spectator-interlocutors present at the screenings. I seek an Asian American politics that is more nuanced, more radical, and more dutiful in its solidarity. Twenty years ago, Vicente M. Diaz (2004) reminded us that “under no circumstance should Pacific Islanders, or Pacific Islands Studies, be subsumed under the institutional framework of Asian American history and experiences” (184). Yet the rise of political monikers like “AAPI,” as if solidarity with Pacific Islanders means simply inserting their name after our own, shows that his warning needs to be forcefully reiterated. Attacking Loni Ding’s work is, paradoxically, a way of respecting and reviving her fierce call for collective liberation because it enables an intervention against the depoliticization of Asian American media and the timidity of Asian American politics. It was Ding who, in 1991, prescribed the “necessity of taking an oppositional stance” for Asian American media; there would be no Asian American media movement without a persistent call for it to do better (p. 54). Today, as an Asian American comprador used the language of social justice to mow down affirmative action, as Donald Trump counts on support in the country’s Chinatowns, as persistent anti-Blackness fuels Asian Americans’ support for the carceral state, and as, despite it all, inspirational Asian American organizers heed the calls of labor struggle, immigrant justice, and #LandBack, Ding’s words must be heard again; depoliticized canonization akin to reissuing Chan is Missing must be refused. I pierce the heart of Asian American media and its settler colonial project out of deep admiration for the very activist filmmakers who were part of it, whose ideological legacy I seek to liberate and enliven, precisely through urgent discomfort and dislodgement.
There is no question that diverse media images are good, but the question remains. Will we allow this diversity to be the boon of a settler colonial, capitalist state, or will we challenge that state for control over our ability to envision a future of communion and deep acts of solidarity? Will we be complacent with leaving history as it is, or will we use it to continue the fervor and demands for a better world that our forebears began for us?
