There’s Certainly a Lot of History Here,But We’re Here to Roast Oysters: Afterlives of Trans-Atlantic Exchange in Top Chef: Charleston

Structuring Top Chef: Genre, Contestants, Regionality

As a game-documentary (or “gamedoc”) reality cooking competition program, Top Chef features casts of professional chefs competing for a monetary grand prize and prestige opportunities (a feature in Food & Wine Magazine, a spot at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colorado), as well as more minor prizes along the way (kitchen appliances, cars, travel). Each season of Top Chef centers on a particular United States city or state, and focuses most of its Quickfire and Elimination challenges around a regional, historical, cultural, or culinary aspect of that locale. Every episode except the finale features two challenges: a Quickfire Challenge, where the winning contestant receives immunity or an advantage in the main challenge, and an Elimination Challenge, where the chefs are evaluated by the judging panel of host Padma Lakshmi, celebrity chef Tom Colicchio, and food writer Gail Simmons. Each episode, one chef wins the week’s challenge and one is eliminated from future competition. As Curnutt (2011) argues, gamedocs like Top Chef “cast participants who can perform their ordinariness while demonstrating a considerable degree of expertise at some other activity” (p. 1066) so as to effectively constitute both the documentary and the game components of its format, simultaneously situating the contestants as “real people” (rather than celebrities) and particularly talented professionals.

Despite the contestants’ nominal status as “real people,” “reality TV repackages difference into comfortingly familiar stock characters and stereotypes. . .Individuals are chosen to represent certain types and then slotted (self-consciously or not) into a limited array of available characters,” as Wang (2010, 405–6) argues. Reality TV stock characters may be particular to certain shows, such as the “She’s Not Here for the Right Reasons” character in the Bachelor franchises. They may also prove transportable across different programs, such as the ubiquitous reality TV villain who declares “I’m not here to make friends.” Besides utilizing its own set of stock characters, reality TV also deploys extra-diegetic cultural stereotypes about race, ethnicity, nationality, class status, regionality, gender, and sexuality. In order to construct compelling storylines, make judges’ verdicts intelligible, and help viewers make sense of the competition’s circumstances, “producers highlight or mask certain characteristics to construct personalities that are easily identifiable, consumable, and approachable” (August and Kim 2016, 341). Like other reality shows, Top Chef inherently traffics in stereotypes, particularly stereotypes rooted in racial, gender, sexual, or class difference, in order “to make ‘real’ people, who are obviously complex and contradictory, understandable to viewers in thirty- or sixty-minute time slots” (Wang 2010, 406). Extant racial stereotypes restrict contestants of color, while white contestants often have a wider array of potential stock character types available to them. The gamedoc format may allow self-aware contestants of color to strategically harness, deploy, and/or defy the stereotypical stock-character slot the show’s editing creates for them, as Wang (2010) and August (2012) argue season-three winner Hung Hyunh did through his Vietnamese American identity in Top Chef: Miami. Nonetheless, the narrative content of Top Chef’s season-long story arcs depend on a grammar of stereotypes to render contestants legible to viewers and to shape their actions, interviews, and performances into satisfying, entertaining television. Indeed, the stereotype functions as the primary organizing principle of reality TV narratives. As Bhabha (1983) writes, “the stereotype. . .is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated” (p. 18). The serialized nature of gamedocs like Top Chef requires repeating elements/segments across episodes in order to simultaneously aid in viewer recall of “characters” and “plot points” while also reinforcing its central (stereotypical) constructions of character. Contestants’ behavior and personae are frequently distilled into a few notable, oft-replayed clips, which will recur in “Previously On. . .” segments bracketing the start of episodes and in flashbacks within episodes. The repetition can also take less direct forms; comments by the judges and other contestants can also function to reiterate character tropes. Since the gamedoc depends on stereotype to structure its narrative and “characters,” Top Chef proves a fruitful site for investigating the content of what, in Bhabha’s terms, is already known and anxiously repeated, both in its presentation of its contestants and of its presentation of regional history and identity.

Top Chef’s focus on regionality also leads the grammar of stereotype to operate at the level of setting even as well as in the characterification of contestants. Locations are discursively constructed by reducing each site to certain featured elements of the region’s identity, emphasizing certain aspects of a given locality and eliding others. From cooking for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in the D.C. season to gambling-themed challenges in the Las Vegas season to a Quickfire set at Churchill Downs in the Kentucky season, Top Chef engages with identifiable or even stereotypical touchstones for particular cities, states, and regions. The regional theming of Top Chef places the franchise in direct proximity to and intimacy with United States history and identity. The fact that “Top Chef producers command fees of several hundred thousand dollars to locate the next season in a particular city or state” (Deery 2014, 13) suggests both that tourism industries view Top Chef as a viable arena for a location’s branding or rebranding and that Top Chef actively participates in how a region’s history and identity become conceptualized in the popular imaginary. Furthermore, as Oren’s (2013, 32; 2016, 245) work makes clear, cooking competitions serve as a cultural field for contesting and/or reinforcing the meanings of identity, esthetics/taste, and value. Oren’s insights let us see how the racial dimensions of food and cooking in the United States render Top Chef’s theatrical interactions between contestants as also a negotiation of racial identity and regional history/culture. Top Chef’s investment in regionality and history alongside its deployment of stereotypes offers a metonymic picture of how regional identity and history is repackaged into popular discursive and material formations, while also suggesting the potential for such formations to cohere around race in unexpected and unpredictable ways.

Top Chef at Boone Hall Plantation: The Hypervisibility and Disavowal of Racialized Realities

Charleston almost immediately establishes its intimacy with and investment in regional and racial history by setting its first elimination challenge at Boone Hall Plantation. After a Quickfire challenge revealing the season’s conceit of casting eight new competitors alongside eight fan favorites from previous seasons, the losing chef from each group learned they would compete in a one-on-one elimination challenge at Boone Hall. This opening appears to foreground aspects of the American South’s racial history and present. However, the scopo-discursive presentation of this challenge reveals that its discourses of acknowledgment primarily serve as discourses of concealment. In other words, the same visual and discursive technologies that Charleston deploys to represent the racial history and present of its region also function to conceal them. Charleston’s simultaneous acknowledgment-concealment of the violent realities of Trans-Atlantic slavery echoes Bhabha’s (1983) understanding of colonial discourse as “an apparatus that turns on the recognition and disavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences” (p. 23). It also suggests the limits of a politics of acknowledgment or representation. Reading for acknowledgment-concealment follows Said’s (1994) argument that “in reading a text, one must open it out both to what went into it and to what its author excluded” (p. 67). Close-reading Top Chef for inclusions and exclusions effected by hosts, contestants, producers, and editors reveals what absences and presences Top Chef signifies within the larger network of contemporary popular culture. In the case of the Boone Hall Plantation challenge, the contradictions, avoidances, and recognitions in Charleston’s presentation of Trans-Atlantic slavery and its afterlives (Hartman 2008) reveal the difficulty of contending with slavery’s violence in the reality television context. It also effortfully consigns the violences of slavery to “history” or “the past” in order to abdicate responsible engagement with the ways in which slavery inaugurates present material conditions.

Visually, Charleston introduces Boone Hall through multiple shots of trees and a voiceover conversation between the two chefs up for elimination, Gerald Sombright and John Tesar:

By introducing Boone Hall through a mix of contestant dialogue, confessional interviews, and images, Charleston presents the plantation impressionistically before presenting it “officially” through the judges. In most elimination challenges, host Padma Lakshmi announces the location and parameters of the challenge before the contestants reach that location. Exceptionally, Charleston first presents the plantation challenge through visuals and contestant conversation. Revealing the challenge location through conversation between Sombright (a new contestant and one of only two Black contestants on the Charleston season) ² and Tesar (a returning white contestant) causes the viewers to recognize the location and its implications alongside the contestants. As Sombright and Tesar drive up to Boone Hall, they realize where the Elimination Challenge will take place, facilitating a kind of anagnorisis in the larger tragedy of racism and anti-Blackness in the United States. Confronting the physical space of the plantation forces Top Chef to recognize and reckon with the history and legacy of Trans-Atlantic slavery, precipitating an awareness of the violence and death that structured and structures contemporary American life. The dramatic music and sound cues underscoring the scene indicate its seriousness and intensity. The tonal shift between “This place is beautiful” (accompanied by landscape shots) and “This is a plantation where people were enslaved” (accompanied by shots of the plantation’s sign and barracks) (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204) further contributes to the mounting tension in the scene. As the contestants and the viewing audience become aware of the challenge location, they come into friction and intimacy with violent history and its afterlives, necessitating and evoking a shift in their affective responses. However, the formal conventions of the gamedoc complicate this sense of realization/awareness for the audience, as Sombright and Tesar’s conversation occurs as they drive up to the plantation, whereas Tesar’s confessional interview, despite being spoken in present tense, was necessarily recorded later. Thus, the contestants’ immediate reactions and their later reflections are temporally compressed into a single time-space for viewers. ³

Within this multi-temporal time-space of recognition, the plantation is revealed discursively through three “this is” declarations: “This place is beautiful,” “This is a plantation where people were enslaved,” and “This is where slaves lived” (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204). The declarative nature of the statements establishes what Top Chef imagines as the “reality” of the location—“This place is beautiful, but this is also a plantation where slaves lived.” It also functions as a discourse acknowledging or recognizing historical reality. Aside from Tesar’s statement “It’s crazy,” the content of his initial dialog about the plantation is almost entirely descriptive or declarative, and Tesar’s confessional notably lacks any personal emotional or evaluative content in diction, even as his tone reflects a sense of soberness. Tesar’s confessional is almost immediately followed by a confessional from Sombright:

In contrast to Tesar’s, Sombright’s confessional opens with a statement of personal feeling (“It feels very surreal”), followed by an evaluative statement of esthetics (“The place is so beautiful”), and finally a declarative statement about historical and present realities (“This is also a place where. . .”). Tesar includes sensory detail (“I see a sign”) and factual statements (“This is a plantation”), but excludes evaluation and connections between history and the present or history and the self. His confessional lacks analysis of either history or his own affective responses, positioning himself as distant or removed from the plantation site and the affective atmospheres it may engender. Sombright, by contrast, foregrounds response and feeling, and even declarative factual statements (“people were treated less than a human being”) are connected to the present/the self (“had an experience that we still, as a country, are still trying to get out of now” [emphasis mine]). Sombright’s use of “we” and “still” indicates both collective intimacy with the past and its durability. In other words, Sombright’s description gestures toward slavery’s afterlives. On the other hand, Tesar’s description avoids both the violence of slavery and the sense of a present profoundly structured by the events of the past; the plantation becomes merely a site where “slaves lived.” In contrast to Sombright’s confessional, Tesar’s illuminates how whiteness facilitates the evasion of historical and present violences and exploitations, allowing him to imagine himself as both uninvolved and unimplicated. Even as both contestants acknowledge slavery as a salient factor, the difference in their inclusions and exclusions serves to re/iterate expectations of how to engage or elide slavery and its afterlives, expectations of what that engagement might entail, and how race might impact those expectations.

Race becomes an organizing factor within the confessionals; for Tesar, a white man, slavery and the plantation are hermetically sealed history (all of his statements about slavery are in the past tense) and both present time and personal emotion become peripheral. For Sombright, a Black man, slavery and the plantation are framed affectively, emphasizing their continuing impacts in the present. Race organizes what can and must be included, and who must become the mouthpiece of those inclusions (and exclusions); here, Top Chef abdicates responsibility for its portrayal of slavery and the plantation, largely leaving that labor on Sombright’s shoulders. Top Chef’s framing re/constructs the plantation’s meaning as a cultural site, participates in the recollection of slavery in the popular imaginary, and re/produces expectations of what is relevant when we talk about Trans-Atlantic slavery. For whom is emotion relevant; from whom is it expected? Who is regarded or privileged as a source of factual information? For whom does slavery constitute the present, and for whom does it merely constitute the past?

The implicit answers to these questions in the plantation challenge not only suggest how history and its construction operate in the contemporary cultural imaginary, but also what kinds of racial futures we are conditioned to anticipate. As Jerng (2017) writes, in the contemporary discursive landscape “the hypervisibility and disavowal of racialized realities coexist” and “race is both ever-present and absent” (p. 4) (Gary Dymski, qtd. in Jerng 2017, 4). This simultaneous hypervisibility/ubiquity and disavowal/absence renders Charleston’s initial presentation of the plantation and Charleston’s racial history and present opaque. Is race salient to this interaction, or not? Is the audience being conditioned to notice race, or not? As Jerng (2017) outlines, the idea that race is either and only there or not there, either a determining cause or nonexistent, fails to capture the multiplicity of “racial modes of thought” that rely on factors other than “the biological or cultural visibility of bodily difference” (p. 19). The salience of race in this interaction is more than the visually legible races of Tesar and Sombright. It also manifests in and coheres around genre, history, memory, speech acts, and framings—what is included, what is excluded, and how those inclusions and exclusions occur. Throughout the elimination challenge sequence, neither race nor its potential impact on the contestants’ different responses to the plantation is named or acknowledged, despite the obvious racial content of the plantation location. In Tesar and Sombright’s conversation and confessionals, race is both present and absent, acknowledged and concealed, recognized and disavowed. Their conversation and confessionals cohere around race as both an “organizing factor” (Jerng 2017, 8) and a “social fact” (Jerng 2017, 9), shaping the possibilities and possible futures that their words project, even as race is never named. The documentary elements of the gamedoc genre operate on the illusion of the audience’s unmediated access to the contestants’ experience. However, reading “Something Old, Something New” contrapuntally (Said 1994, 66) for how and why what sorts of information are organized reveals how race’s social meanings both shape and are shaped by discursive constructions of history and regionality.

The Stakes of Struggle: Stock Character and Racial Stereotype

Prior to the Elimination Challenge segment at Boone Hall, both Sombright and Tesar give confessionals in which they discuss their personal struggles, juxtaposed with footage of them at the contestants’ house. These confessionals begin to construct narratives and potential character arcs for Sombright and Tesar, slotting them into the kinds of racialized stock character roles that Top Chef’s grammar of stereotype relies on. These stereotype-driven stock characters then participate in discourses that not only acknowledge and conceal racialized power hierarchies of the past and present, but also conceal them by appearing to acknowledge them. In other words, stereotype becomes the structure on which these discourses organize themselves and operate, in both the construction of character and the re/construction of history. Oren (2016) outlines how “in the tightly orchestrated universe of the cooking competition, labor, style, and their results are the key to personality and the ways each chef is distinguished from the others. Cooking is identity” (p. 256). Over the course of the season, food, and cooking style become intertwined with each chef’s identity, but particularly in the initial episodes, personal history serves as a shortcut to construct the contestants as “characters” and cultivate audience investment. In order to establish stakes for the early elimination challenges, reality cooking competitions often spend significant time on contestant biography and interpersonal dynamics, as “Something Old, Something New” does with Sombright and Tesar. The premiere episodes of each season cannot fully establish personae or “brands” for contestants in the way that seasons as a whole do, but they do begin to locate contestants within “a limited array of available characters” (Wang 2010, 406). While Sombright, as a new contestant, comes into the competition without many preconceived notions attached to his personality or culinary style, Tesar, as a returning contestant, must contend with and navigate the brand established in his previous appearance on the show. However, both contestants’ backstories and characterizations are subtextually racialized, revealing the kind of ideological work race can do as a narrative and characterizing structure. Race structures the stakes of who Sombright and Tesar can be and what they can want or hope for within the context of Top Chef.

Tesar’s whiteness allows him to define and hope for “success” on Top Chef via personal growth and professional validation; the stakes of the competition center on his own moral development and his positioning in the wider milieu of celebrity chefs. In his first appearance on Top Chef (2012’s Top Chef: Seattle), Tesar became notorious for his volatile behavior, a reputation that predates his tenure on the show. In a 2011 D Magazine profile titled “John Tesar: The Most Hated Chef in Dallas,” Jason Sheeler described Tesar as “a talented chef, but he’s also a narcissistic sociopath with his calloused index finger always hovering above the self-destruct button” (Sheeler 2011). On the Seattle season, Tesar’s fellow contestants found him difficult to work with, and he often instigated arguments with them in the stew room where contestants wait between their appearances at Judge’s Table. The kind of inflammatory behavior Tesar became known for both on and off Top Chef does not bar him from inclusion in the arena of fine dining or the arena of reality culinary television. His whiteness allows him to remain in positions of prestige or visibility despite his abrasive behavior and also allows him to pursue a “redemption arc” on a public stage—the kind of “redemption arc” rarely afforded to people of color on television in the United States. In his confessional before the elimination challenge, Tesar describes how many chefs in his age bracket have “burnt out or faded away” or become celebrity chefs. Therefore, winning Top Chef and achieving a higher level of prestige would vindicate his career. Tesar also discusses how he has reformed since Seattle, and that he hopes to be a “kinder, gentler John Tesar” (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204) in Charleston. However, he immediately begins to debate whether or not he wants to try to “gameplay and get up into Gerald’s head, or should I just leave him alone” (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204). Within a few beats, Tesar is slotted into the “semi-reformed bad boy struggling with his demons” archetype, a storyline which continued for him throughout the season with varying degrees of emphasis. Tesar’s Charleston revision of his brand/character from Seattle highlights both how contestants can reflexively navigate the character they become in the context of the show, ⁴ and how Top Chef’s recycling of “durable participants” (Curnutt 2011, 1066) cultivates long-term audience investment and entertainment. As a known quantity to the viewers, the stakes for Tesar’s success (or not) in the upcoming Quickfire challenge become related not only to his potential to succeed in the competition, but also to his own ability to achieve his goal of becoming “a kinder, gentler John Tesar.” Emphasizing the show’s potential to facilitate culinary celebrity and personal moral development for Tesar, Top Chef’s characterization of Tesar on Charleston demonstrates how white supremacy allows for white people’s continued access to, participation in, and dominance of cultural arenas.

In contrast, Top Chef does not conceive of the opportunity for culinary celebrity or moral development as key aspects of Sombright’s Top Chef experience, focusing instead on economic security, revealing how, for Black contestants, the reality competition is imagined as a route not to celebrity, but to survival. While Tesar’s pre-Quickfire confessionals build off the character he inhabited on Seattle, Sombright’s confessionals work to establish how he understands the stakes of the competition, framing his participation in Top Chef not in the terms of personal development, but in the terms of economic stability. After Tesar’s confessionals and B-roll footage of him cooking in the house kitchen, “Something Old, Something New” cuts to Sombright, who describes in a confessional how he once chose to live in his car for a period of financial difficulties related to his divorce, in order to provide housing for his ex-wife and children. Sombright concludes his anecdote by saying, “I’ve survived so much hardship in my life and I’m ready to fight for my life to not go home” (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204). Sombright’s confessional establishes him within the archetype of a contestant who comes from a place of struggle and stands to gain significantly from performing well in the competition, though what he stands to gain is not the chance to be a celebrity chef, but the chance to have basic human rights, such as access to food, shelter, and security. Top Chef capitalizes on his experiences of economic precarity in order to cultivate audience investment in Sombright, who at this point remains largely unknown to viewers, by positioning him as an underdog whose past hardships have prepared him for the difficulties of the competition itself. Sombright’s history of economic struggle is not presented as a result of the exploitation intrinsic to racial capitalism; instead, it is presented as a challenge which helped make him ready to compete on Top Chef. The juxtaposition of Tesar’s and Sombright’s “struggles” establishes the stakes of remaining in the competition, amplifying the drama of their imminent showdown, even as the stakes for each (redemptive validation for Tesar, financial security for Sombright) vary significantly in intensity. By framing the stakes of Sombright’s culinary performance in terms of poverty and survival while Tesar’s arc mainly concerns a kind of internal moral journey, Top Chef projects a present and future in which Black people struggle to survive while white people are free to pursue personal development and vocational prestige, both within and beyond the arena of the show.

Evacuating History, Distilling Whiteness

As Sombright and Tesar arrive at the cooking site at Boone Hall, the judges’ discussion of the plantation supplants earlier discourses of acknowledgment with discourses that conceal or elide, revealing how acknowledgment can subtend occlusion. While the contestants highlight the plantation’s connection to slavery, the comments from the judges increasingly consign slavery to the periphery of the challenge and the plantation. Lakshmi introduces the elimination challenge at the plantation, with “Welcome to the historic Boone Hall Plantation. Since the 1950s, this land has been open to visitors to educate the public and honor those who worked and toiled here so that we may never forget our past” (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204). Lakshmi’s diction displaces and evacuates enslaved people and the violence white enslavers committed against them, replacing “enslaved people” with “those who worked and toiled here.” This language not only eliminates any specific reference to enslaved people (replacing any distinct noun with “those”), but also displaces the racial/ontological dimensions and physical, psychological, and epistemic violences of Trans-Atlantic slavery with a discourse of work/labor.

Lakshmi’s words also relegate slavery to a temporally distant history. Though she describes the plantation as “historic,” she follows that statement with “since the 1950s,” essentially “beginning” history there, further concealing and erasing the realities of the plantation’s history even as she appears to explicitly signpost it. While Sombright highlighted slavery’s afterlives, Lakshmi frames slavery as something that has definitively concluded—even at risk of being forgotten. Lakshmi’s framing suggests that the continued utility of the plantation comes from its ability to remind “us” of our country’s history of racial violence. This framing contradicts her description of the plantation without any explicit reference to race or slavery, begging the question of what exactly is being remembered and what part of “our past” is vulnerable to oblivion. Both Lakshmi’s euphemistic avoidance of the words “slaves” or “enslaved people” and her construction of slavery as a closed chapter of history serve to conceal slavery and the racial violences enacted and perpetuated by white settler-enslavers against Black people. Charleston’s apparent acknowledgment of the plantation serves primarily to obscure both the violent realities of slavery in the past and its continuing impact into the material conditions of the present.

After introducing Boone Hall, Lakshmi asks Sombright and Tesar about their emotional responses to the plantation:

Tesar’s claim that Boone Hall is “a great reminder of what should never happen again” performs a similar function to Lakshmi’s statement that Boone Hall will “educate the public” so that “we may never forget our past” (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204). Just as Lakshmi evacuates enslaved people from the discourse around the plantation, Tesar evacuates slavery itself, seemingly unable to name exactly what it was that “should never happen again.” His inability to name slavery alongside his declaration that the plantation is a “great reminder” suggests that a thing being remembered can disappear into the idea and practice of remembering. Both Lakshmi and Tesar highlight the significance of remembering, their diction repeatedly returning to words like “educate,” “never forget,” and “reminder.” However, their appeals to remembering/acknowledgment ultimately discursively conceal the thing being remembered. Slavery becomes a lacuna at the center of their discourse, an invisible center of gravity around which remembering orbits. History becomes displaced by the discourse of remembering it, the repeated acknowledgment of the past concealing what occurred within it.

Lakshmi’s questions echo Sombright and Tesar’s initial responses to the plantation in their confessionals. Once again, Sombright frames slavery as connected to the present and the self, whereas Tesar, like Lakshmi, consigns it to history. Sombright explicitly frames himself as a descendent of enslaved people, and he locates that heritage through the phrase “post-slavery blood coursing through my veins” (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204). If, as Taylor (2013) argues, “‘race-thinking’ is a way of assigning generic meanings to bodies and bloodlines” (p. 16), Sombright’s statement invokes Taylor’s (2013) understanding of bloodlines as “ancestral lines, heritage, the causal antecedents of an organism” (p. 17). Although race is not named, race-thinking still shapes the interactions within the Boone Hall challenge. Sombright’s reference to “post-slavery blood” names his heritage and ancestry; his claim that the blood is “coursing through [his] veins” asserts the afterlives of slavery (Hartman 2008) in the present-tense of his body. Just as his statement that slavery was “an experience that we. . .are still trying to get out of now” (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204) suggests that slavery remains a structuring factor for contemporary life, his presentation of himself as the descendent of enslaved people textures the location, Lakshmi’s question, and Tesar’s response. Although Lakshmi poses her questions about feelings to both Sombright and Tesar, Sombright’s response calls his fellow contestants and the viewing audience to notice race as both a meaning attached to his body/bloodline and as a social fact “around which a scene or situation can cohere” (Jerng 2017, 8). While Sombright invokes his Blackness and his heritage as the descendent of enslaved people, he also implies that race is a salient factor around which Charleston’s elimination challenge at Boone Hall coheres. Race here is not only an embodied identity, but an organizing factor both for the plantation itself and for the challenge Charleston conducts there.

Although Sombright invokes racial history and its potential to shape interactions and affective responses in the present, Tesar’s response to Lakshmi’s question is almost incoherent in its contradictory post-racialism. Tesar begins by saying, “You know, I have a little bit of Gerald’s sentiment” (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204). Tesar seems to attempt to draw a line between Sombright’s experience of the plantation and his own, but his phrasing becomes contradictory and illegible as soon as one attempts to locate what part of Sombright’s sentiment Tesar claims to have. Sombright’s answer described how his “post-slavery blood” made being at Boone Hall feel “surreal” but “also very comforting, for some reason.” Sombright’s use of the conjunction “so” implies that his affective response arises from his racial heritage; it feels “surreal” but “also very comforting” because he is a Black person about to participate in a cooking competition at a plantation. When Tesar claims to “have a little bit of Gerald’s sentiment,” whatever sentiment he claims to have remains opaque. Of course, it is possible that Sombright said more in his response, and that his statement was edited down in the episode’s final cut. However, regardless of whether the audience has total or partial access to Sombright’s response, the editing of the episode still juxtaposes Sombright’s and Tesar’s responses, shaping the episode’s connotations. What is included puts forward particular structures of meaning, and what is excluded participates in those structures, even as we cannot access it. The spectral influence of producers and editors puts forward a deliberately constructed narrative through inclusions and exclusions. Although these exclusions are easily missable, once we begin looking for them, the inability to locate or reveal these exclusions makes us acutely aware of the absence of what we cannot know. Does Tesar also find being at the plantation surreal but comforting, or is he identifying with something else Sombright said, unknowable to the viewer? Either way, what in Sombright’s statement led Tesar to attempt to lay claim to a shared sentiment or affect? Whatever its origins, the episode places Tesar’s “I have a little bit of Gerald’s sentiment” in direct conversation with Sombright’s “There’s some post-slavery blood coursing through my veins,” suggesting a claim to shared experience, or at the very least shared sentiment, despite Sombright’s affect being dependent on his Black identity.

Tesar’s response repeatedly oscillates between attempts to implicitly equate his experiences with Sombright’s and walkbacks of his own statements, participating in “the hypervisibility and disavowal of racialized realities” (Jerng 2017, 4). “I have a little bit of Gerald’s sentiment” is immediately followed by “I’m not in the same place” (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204). Here, Tesar potentially suggests his awareness of his false equation, acknowledging in this moment that he, as a white man, does not have the same affective relationship to the plantation as Sombright. Although his statement that he is “not in the same place” primarily refers to an emotional “place” or state, his words could be read as indicating, however inadvertently, the spatial gap of the plantation for him and Sombright. Boone Hall carries different meanings, facilitates different affects; in some way, Sombright and Tesar are quite literally not in the same kind of place. Their social location directly informs their experiences of their physical location, so that they are/not in the same place. Tesar’s acknowledgment implies his social location and his whiteness without naming it, and any “because” that could have followed “I’m not in the same place” remains unspoken. Nevertheless, his words call attention to the ways that race, as a social fact, can structure a situation, altering locations and affects. In this moment, Tesar seems to acknowledge, however vaguely, the hypervisibility of Top Chef’s racialized realities.

Tesar’s moment of acknowledgment is immediately followed by disavowal and a rhetorical attempt to evacuate his own guilt and discomfort. Tesar continues, saying “My mother was a civil rights activist in the 60s” (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204): a move to white innocence, using his mother as a proxy by which he can virtue-signal in an attempt to absolve his own racial guilt. The plantation creates a sense of guilt and dissonance in Tesar, which he seeks to alleviate through positioning himself as intimately connected to the civil rights movement, and, by implication, as a “good white person.” If his statement “I’m not in the same place” implies his whiteness, his gesture toward his mother’s involvement in civil rights activism attempts to disavow his culpability for racism past or present. Associating himself with his mother, Tesar attempts to position himself on “the right side of history” in order to assuage both his awareness of his whiteness and his guilt. He concludes by locating both the civil rights movement and slavery in the sealed past and identifying the plantation as a “reminder of what should never happen again” (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204).

Tesar’s response to Lakshmi distills multiple valences of the psychology of whiteness, recognizing, and disavowing whiteness while evacuating history. Tesar’s contradictory and almost incoherent response coheres only when understood as an expression of the lexical and psychological failures of whiteness. As Rankine et al. (2015) write, “white people in America. . .know that they are white, but they must not know what they know. They know that they are white, but they cannot know that such a thing has social meaning. . .that their whiteness accrues power” (p. 20). Tesar’s seeming inability to name whiteness or slavery during the Boone Hall Plantation challenge reflects his vacillation between moments of anagnorisis and ignorance (denial, innocence). Coherence demands that he conceal the same things he briefly acknowledges. He knows he is white, but he must not know what he knows.

Remembering to Forget: The Disappearance of the Plantation

After Lakshmi asks Sombright and Tesar about their emotional responses to the plantation, judge Gail Simmons declares “There’s certainly a lot of history here, but we’re here because it’s home to one of the world’s largest oyster festivals” (Top Chef 2016, episode no. 204). The grammatical structure of Simmons’s sentence compartmentalizes even the discourse of acknowledgment, bracketing off Charleston’s evocation of the plantation’s history of slavery and moving on to the plantation’s present of oyster festivals. After “Something Old, Something New” aired, Charleston faced online pushback for setting its premiere episode at a plantation. In tweets and interviews following the premiere, head judge Tom Colicchio made similar rhetorical moves to Simmons’s grammatical compartmentalization within the episode. Colicchio initially positions Boone Hall as a locus of Southern history, but ultimately foregrounds the culinary relevance of the oyster festival. Colicchio responded to the criticism of “Something Old, Something New,” both over Twitter (tweeting, “We are shooting in the South I would think it odd if we ignored Charlestons [sic] History” [@tomcolicchio 2016]) and in an interview with Esquire:

Some people thought we did a pretty good job of handling it, while others were angry because they thought we were using the location for entertainment. People weren’t upset that we were there, but that we were there as a cooking show. Well, [Boone Hall] has also been the site of the Charleston oyster festival for the past 34 years, and we were doing an oyster roast competition. That’s why we were there. (Colicchio 2017)

Colicchio’s response betrays slippages similar to Lakshmi’s introduction of Boone Hall and Simmons’s transition from discussing the plantation to presenting the Elimination Challenge. In his interview with Esquire, Colicchio reiterates that Charleston’s reason for setting an Elimination Challenge at Boone Hall was the oyster festival, even as he claimed on Twitter that Charleston’s function was addressing Southern history. Both Simmons’s “we’re here because it’s home to one of the world’s largest oyster festivals” and Colicchio’s claim that “we were doing an oyster roast competition. That’s why we were there” displace any criticism of Charleston’s setting, evacuating history and historicity from Boone Hall in favor of positioning the plantation as a culinary site. Top Chef draws on the wider cultural romanticization of Southern and/or plantation lifestyle and cuisine, which can be seen everywhere from plantation weddings to plantation restaurants to the bevy of television programs focusing on (almost always white) Southern cuisine such as Trisha’s Southern Kitchen, Southern at Heart, and Somewhere South. ⁵ The broader nostalgic cultural investment in a certain imagination of a white Southern subculture as expressed through hospitality and food allows Top Chef to imagine the plantation as a site of solely culinary importance, suggesting that the culinary culture of the American South can be imagined as separate from history, race, and power, just as Boone Hall Plantation can be imagined as, first and foremost, a place to roast oysters.

Like Lakshmi’s introduction of Boone Hall, Simmons’s, and Colicchio’s comments construct slavery as a closed chapter of history, even as Colicchio’s tweet suggests that Charleston was trying not to avoid or ignore history. In all these cases, Lakshmi, Simmons, and Colicchio cannot help but acknowledge the plantation and its history of slavery at the same time that they move to conceal this history by focusing on the oyster festival—as though the oyster festival does not occur at a plantation. Within their discourse, Boone Hall’s oyster festivals somehow allow it to stop being a plantation, facilitating Simmons’s turn from “there’s certainly a lot of history here” to “but we’re here because it’s home to one of the world’s largest oyster festivals.” The remainder of “Something Old, Something New” never mentions the plantation, slavery, or enslaved people again. The episode consigns history to two short segments. It also does not seem to consider that the location may impact the contestants’ performance or the outcomes of the game. Simmons’s statement casts the plantation’s relationship to slavery as peripheral, mere background for the oyster-roasting Elimination Challenge—which ultimately results in Sombright’s elimination. Sombright’s elimination in this first-episode oyster-roasting challenge enacts the kind of prestidigitational acknowledgment-concealment present throughout Top Chef and reality television more generally. “Something Old, Something New” displaces the labor of reckoning with the plantation on to Sombright’s shoulders only to eliminate him, while Tesar survives this elimination challenge and ultimately continues on to the semifinal. While Tesar makes it to Charleston’s final four, Sombright becomes yet another typical instance of “the Black contestant” being among the first eliminated from the competition. Keeping Sombright around just long enough for the challenge set at a plantation allows his mere presence as a Black man to enact recognition and disavowal of how race structures what is possible in reality television.

Through its grammar of stereotype, which serves in part to construct discourses of acknowledgment-concealment, the genre conventions of Top Chef’s gamedoc format both demonstrate and generate specific modes of race-thinking that reflect and impact the contemporary cultural imaginary. While the inclusivity of casting in programs like Top Chef may appear to promote left-leaning and/or liberal values, they also promote an illusory vision of the American professional sphere as a multiculturalist meritocracy, where the contestants’ racial, economic, and socio-political standings are deemed irrelevant to the game’s outcomes. The supposedly meritocratic construction of the “game” portion often contradicts the recognitions and disavowals of difference that occur at the level of the “documentary.” Reading Top Chef for its grammars of stereotype and discourses of acknowledgment-concealment suggests that race remains a structuring factor around which scenarios, discourses, and relations of power can cohere, even—or especially—when race remains unnamed.