Date of Award
5-2025
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
English
Program
English (MA)
First Advisor/Chairperson
Dr. Ben Wetherbee
Abstract
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.
Recommended Citation
LaForest, Abby A., "A Taste of Rhetoric: Moves & Practices in the Decolonization & Restoration of Historic Foodways" (2025). All NMU Master's Theses. 885.
https://commons.nmu.edu/theses/885
Access Type
Open Access
Signed signature page
Included in
Food Studies Commons, Other Rhetoric and Composition Commons, Rhetoric Commons, Social Justice Commons