Abstract

The article examines the erasure of any concept of the ‘public kitchen’ in the Philippines as demonstrative of statewide suppression of marginal identities that continues to facilitate the simplistic and uncomplicated entry of neocolonial modernity. As a yardstick of growth and progress under the US colonial government, the battle to modernize the Philippines extends far beyond the political and administrative terrains and into the reconfiguration of domestic space. In particular, the kitchen was to become an important site that demonstrated the efficiency and power of American science. Accorded with new functions emanating from a colonial ideology, the induction of cooking and eating as expressions of collective identity have considerable implications for the manner in which public and private spaces are imagined