Contained Materialisms: Canned Goods and the Matter of Transpacific Militarization in Performance

Janine Rogers
Theater
UC Los Angeles

Contained Materialisms: Canned Goods and the Matter of Transpacific Militarization in Performance examines how canned food, historically linked to military logistics and colonial expansion, mediates Asian Pacific American subjectivities and histories. Designed to sustain military campaigns, canned goods have played a crucial role in shaping migration patterns, labor economies, and cultural identities across the Pacific. This dissertation brings together critical militarization studies, Asian Pacific American studies, and performance studies to analyze how nonhuman objects—specifically canned food—animate histories of war, empire, and racialization. By tracing the circulation of canned salmon, pineapple, SPAM, and Chun King canned foods, this research interrogates the ways in which these products have shaped Asian Pacific American experiences. Contained Materials considers performance as a heuristic in understanding such dynamics, through cases of artistic production such as works of theater and musicals, commercial production such as advertising and tourism, and embodied quotidian practices of cooking with canned goods. This project thus reveals how food production sites, military supply chains, and artistic representations of canned goods produce and contest racialized narratives of assimilation, labor movements, and cultural belonging.