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Published in
Visionary Voices
Beyond the Colonized "Heart": A Feminist Critique of Merlinda Bobis' Banana Heart Summer
Visionary Voices, 2(1), 43-49, ISSN: 3082-4389, 2026.
Recommended Citation:
Umpa, N. A. (2026). Beyond the Colonized "Heart": A Feminist Critique of Merlinda Bobis' Banana Heart Summer. In Visionary Voices (Vol. 2, Number 1, pp. 43–49). Lakbay-Diwa Publishing. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18600407
Author(s)
Umpa, Noraima A.
Description
A feminist and postcolonial literary analysis is advanced of Merlinda Bobis’s Banana Heart Summer, a coming-of-age novel set in a rural Philippine community during the 1960s. Beyond the Colonized “Heart”, the analysis approaches poverty, hunger, and gendered labor not as lived realities but as narrative constructs shaped through language, symbolism, and point of view. Central to the discussion is food as metaphor, specifically Filipino cuisine as a charged cultural site where meanings of identity, deprivation, care, and struggle are produced and contested. Through close textual analysis, hunger is examined not only as material absence but also as an affective and ideological condition inflected by colonial histories and patriarchal social arrangements. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial frameworks, the study situates these representations within the novel’s characterization, domestic spaces, conflicts, and child-centered perspective, foregrounding how female figures negotiate silence, endurance, and limited agency through everyday acts of feeding and nurturing. Formalist attention to satire and defamiliarization reveals how ordinary culinary practices are rendered strange, exposing the normalization of inequality and social hierarchy. Semiotic analysis further demonstrates how food imagery functions ambivalently as a mechanism of survival and a potential site of resistance, raising questions about whether women’s voices within these spaces are amplified or constrained. By narrowing its focus to metaphor and representation, this article argues that Banana Heart Summer transforms food from a narrative backdrop into a critical device through which gendered struggle, colonial residue, and identity formation are articulated, thereby inviting reflection on how power, care, and resistance are encoded in the most intimate practices of everyday life.
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