AbstractThis article reconstructs the American career of the Manila-born author Ramon Reyes Lala. Lala became a naturalized United States citizen shortly before the War of 1898 garnered public interest in the history and geography of the Philippines. He capitalized on this interest by fashioning himself into an Oxford-educated nationalist exiled in the United States for his anti-Spanish activism, all the while hiding a South Asian background. Lala's spirited defense of American annexation and war earned him the political patronage of the Republican Party. Yet though Lala offered himself as a ‘model’ Philippine-American citizen, his patrons offered Lala as evidence of U.S. benevolence and Philippine civilization potential shorn of citizenship. His embodied contradictions, then, extended to his position as a producer of colonial knowledge, a racialized commodity, and a representative Filipino in the United States when many in the archipelago would not recognize him as such. Lala's advocacy for American Empire, I contend, reflected an understanding of nationality born of diasporic merchant communities, while his precarious success in the middle-class economy of print and public speaking depended on his deft maneuvering between modalities of power hardening in terms of race. His career speaks more broadly to the entwined and contradictory processes of commerce, race formation, and colonial knowledge production.
Perhaps no commodity better conjures the tropical imaginary than the coconut. Whether depicted in postcards of tree-lined beaches or featured in rum-based drinks, the stone fruit signifies a life of ease and splendour in equatorial climes. The more recent embrace of low-carb and high-fat diets, however, elevated coconut oil to the pantheon of "superfoods"-fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins hailed not just for their nutritive content but as aids to weight loss, disease prevention, and healing. In five printings between 1999 and 2013, Bruce Fife's The Coconut Oil Miracle deemed it "the premier dietary fat of all time." 1 Cherie and John Calbom's The Coconut Diet (2005) touted coconut oil's ability to make the consumer feel "Healthy, trim, energetic, and alive!" during a three-week journey "to a slimmer you." 2 For proof of coconut oil's enduring goodness, Fife pointed to "the natives who inhabit the islands of the South Pacific." "These people in their tropical paradise," he informed his readers, "enjoy a remarkable degree of good health, relatively free from the aches and pains of degenerative disease that plague most of the rest of the world." 3 Likewise, the Calboms held the pre-World War II Pacific, in which "people who ate traditional foods in countries such as the Philippines were rarely sick or overweight," as evidence of the coconut's healing power. 4 Such claims launched a coconut cottage industry in which diet gurus and web-based influencers offered coconut oil supplements and extrarefined cold-pressed virgin coconut oil as an alternative to soy and canola oils. The coconut craze quickly extended beyond oil to include coconut flour pounded from the dried meat as a high-fiber, gluten-free alternative to wheat flour; coconut sugar 38 Worcester, "Coconut Growing in the Philippines." 39 Worcester, "Coconut Growing in the Philippines," 3.
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