Soul Food, Stir Fry, and Citizenship: The Transnational Construction of Tom’s Dixie Kitchen in Manila

This paper examines American empire through the eyes of Thomas Pritchard, a Grenadian chef who lived in Barbados before establishing Manila’s most well-known cultural hub and political gathering place. As American imperialists, Filipino nationalists, and fellow black disaporic people alike rubbed shoulders between his plates of lumpia, bowls of gumbo, and glasses of Moët, identities of all sorts became open to interpretation.  Far from idiosyncratic, however, Pritchard was one of thousands of black migrants from across the Atlantic world who relocated to the Philippines just as the American state began considering a federally funded 1898 colonization plan to bring five million more African Americans to the Philippines.  This possibility, of an interracial black Pacific, promised to reshape American empire both at home and abroad. 

By carefully navigating these fluid currents of American empire, Pritchard stretched not only the palates of his customers but also the interpretive power of the colonial state.  Who was this black man relative to the imperial regime and which of the many competing national and state formations did he rightfully belong to? This question remained open until after Filipino independence in 1946 when Pritchard finally became the subject of a Philippine Supreme Court Case to determine once and for all the citizenship of this archetypal black internationalist.  By reading this court case against restaurant menus, Philippine cook books, and Pritchard’s own racialized self-representations, this paper hopes to paint a new picture of American empire in the Philippines.  Rather than a flat narrative of hero and villain, that binds black people to bit players in America’s Pacific empire, this paper shows black migrants to the Pacific shaping both the cultural and the political parameters of a very fragile and vulnerable American colonial project.