Authenticity, legitimacy, and the radical politics of ceviche

Presenter: Nino Bariola, University of Texas at Austin

Abstract: Creative and artistic producers from racialized social groups are often evaluated through differentiated and exclusionary logics and they must deal with critics’ and consumers’ expectations about how they represent a general or specific ethnic category. While some studies have depicted how creative producers conform to authenticity standards and expectations, we know less about how they do authenticity work while at the same time seeking aesthetic mobility and consecration. To tackle this question, this article reconstructs how and why Peruvian chefs recently used and transformed Peruvian-style ceviche to promote their gastronomy worldwide with considerable success. A marginal dish in Peru’s culinary repertoire until the 1990s—when the country was facing a harsh period of civil war, hyperinflation, and a cholera epidemic—ceviche then rapidly gained presence in some of the world’s best restaurants and became the flagship of an emergent gastronomy. I argue that chefs purposefully chose ceviche because of the dish’s ability to convey authenticity and to foreground Peruvian cuisine’s resemblance to Japan’s culinary tradition. Given Japan’s presence in the higher echelons of the culinary hierarchy, Peruvian chefs used ceviche to highlight the prevalence of Japan’s influence in their gastronomy. They situate and contextualize Japanese legacies in their culinary repertoire by mobilizing a historic discourse of mestizaje (i.e. racial and cultural mixing), thus avoiding potential threats to their authenticity claims.

This online research talk is part of the Culture, Health, Environment, Food and Society (CHEFS) research cluster. If you’d like to receive a meeting invite for your calendar with Zoom link, please email Jennifer Smith Maguire (j.smith1@shu.ac.uk). https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/chefscluster/chefs-online-research-talks/