A Taste of Rhetoric: Moves & Practices in the Decolonization & Restoration of Historic Foodways

<p>Language and rhetoric are foundational influences on cultural practices, including culinary ones. The subdiscipline of food rhetoric studies communication about the processes of eating, cooking, transporting, and trading food, especially within the cultures of historically marginalized peoples. The past decades have seen a profusion of academic food research, but the role of language in understanding food, especially in a multicultural, globalized world, remains understudied. This paper examines how three rhetorical theories foundational to identity formation and layered understandings of meaning – (a) Dr. Karen Barad’s (they/them) theory of posthumanist performativity, (b) Dr. Maurice Charland’s theory of constitutive rhetoric, and (c) Drs. Romeo García and Gesa E. Kirsch’s notion of deep rhetoricity – have been used efficiently in language frames for both Black and White foodways in the American South, as well as the Great Lakes Anishinaabe Three Fires Confederacy. Through the author’s positioning as a white woman explained through autoethnography techniques, this study explores how these three rhetorical theories are at play in Black culinary historian Michael W. Twitty’s written work and written accounts of Indigenous foodways in the Great Lakes region. The results from this research argue that humans already have the tools to create more inclusive language frames when talking about foodways, and that we just need to make more room at the table for such rhetoric.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2025

Author dc:creator

• LaForest, Abby A

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dr. Ben Wetherbee

• rhetoric
• food rhetoric
• constitutive
• posthumanist
• deep rhetoricity
• Southern foodways
• Anishinaabe foodways
• autoethnography
• Food Studies
• Other Rhetoric and Composition
• Rhetoric and Composition
• Social Justice

Repository record dc:identifier

https://commons.nmu.edu/theses/885

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:commons.nmu.edu:theses-1940