Consuming Identity

The Role of Food in Redefining the South

Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, Wendy Atkins-Sayre

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781496809193
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique publique en matière d'agriculture

Southerners love to talk food, quickly revealing likes and dislikes, regional preferences, and their own delicious stories. Because the topic often crosses lines of race, class, gender, and region, food supplies a common fuel to launch discussion. Consuming Identity sifts through the self-definitions, allegiances, and bonds made possible and strengthened through the theme of southern foodways. The book focuses on the role food plays in building identities, accounting for the messages food sends about who we are, how we see ourselves, and how we see others. While many volumes examine southern food, this one is the first to focus on food's rhetorical qualities and the effect that it can have on culture.The volume examines southern food stories that speak to the identity of the region, explain how food helps to build identities, and explore how it enables cultural exchange. Food acts rhetorically, with what we choose to eat and serve sending distinct messages. It also serves a vital identity-building function, factoring heavily into our memories, narratives, and understanding of who we are. Finally, because food and the tales surrounding it are so important to southerners, the rhetoric of food offers a significant and meaningful way to open up dialogue in the region. By sharing and celebrating both foodways and the food itself, southerners are able to revel in shared histories and traditions. In this way individuals find a common language despite the divisions of race and class that continue to plague the South. The rich subject of southern fare serves up a significant starting point for understanding the powerful rhetorical potential of all food.

PART ONE

THE RHETORICAL POTENTIAL OF SOUTHERN FOOD

CHAPTER ONE

CONSUMING RHETORIC

How Southern Food Speaks

The scene at Weaver D’s restaurant in Athens, Georgia, is just what we expected. The restaurant was made famous by Athens-based rock band REM after they named their album, Automatic for the People, for the owner’s catch phrase. The cinderblock building, not far from the University of Georgia campus, is painted lime green and topped by a plain white sign announcing that this is “Weaver D’s Delicious Fine Foods—‘Automatic for the People’” (see figure 1.1). We are thrilled as we walk through the doors and find ourselves not only being waited on by Weaver D himself, but also getting “automatic’ed” (his famous greeting) by Weaver after ordering. The restaurant is simple. A small, one-room dining area is filled with long tables pushed together and covered with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths. After ordering at the counter, we head over to the kitchen window to stare down at the glorious sides—green beans, macaroni and cheese, greens, and squash casserole on this day—and make our selection. Decoration in the room is scant—a few signed REM posters, some framed newspaper articles, Whitney Houston albums hanging on the walls, a television tuned to Judge Judy. In short, everything about the place could be seen as mundane. And yet, walking through those doors, eating the outstanding food, and observing the other customers as they came in, ordered, and partook of that Southern food masterpiece was a bit magical for us. It was an enactment of all that we had been arguing Southern food could do. Our research unfolded before our eyes.

Figure 1.1 Weaver D’s in Athens, Georgia

The food was good, no doubt, but there are better places to get Southern fare. We could have found better service elsewhere and certainly finer dining rooms in other locations. What made this restaurant different? The people. In a town, not unlike many Southern cities, that still faces de facto segregation in its neighborhoods, schools, and churches, the clientele was notably diverse. We sat next to a middle-aged black couple who prayed together before turning to their Styrofoam plates piled high with fried chicken and sides. Sharing the same table, we had a brief conversation about which hot sauce might make the best addition to the greens. While eating, we watched as a young black man, possibly a student, was welcomed by Weaver D and given his “usual plate.” After that, a white family entered the restaurant. The parents, seeming a bit out of their element (perhaps visiting their college kids), tentatively ordered and sat down at the next table over to catch up with each other. Next came an older black man, still wearing his work overalls, who ordered his lunch. What brought this range of people together was the food. Although the interaction between the individuals might not have been significant, the fact that they were physically coming together in search of a common food created a moment of crossover between worlds. More than a brief shared moment in a fast food restaurant, this slower and homemade version encouraged people to pause. The food itself also served to connect people, as we discuss later in this chapter. The shared words, expressions of joy over the food, and quick smiles that were exchanged added something more to a feeling of consubstantiality. And this was not unlike the scene that we saw playing out in Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn Curbside Market, Birmingham’s Dreamland Bar-b-que, Memphis’s Gus’s Chicken, New Orleans’s Dooky Chase, and many other places throughout the South. Food brings people together and is a significant part of Southern culture.

More than a passing fad or restaurant trend, the variety of ways that people seek to connect to the South through food-based experiences presents an intriguing question for scholars interested in constitutive rhetorical theory. In seeking to relate to, experience, or create this particular type of food, a desire to connect or to identify with this food culture becomes evident. In jointly celebrating Southern food, Southerners of all types have the potential to focus on commonality and shared ground—not the division that has historically plagued the region. The difficult past of the South does not disappear (Jim Crow, civil rights, and ERA, for instance)—nor should it—but a shared appreciation for Southern food provides a moment to experience what it might be like to come together in celebration of the region. This positive view offers new ways for people to relate to each other, to eat, and to act as consumers. Connecting with a Southern food identity, then, begins to constitute how we view ourselves and can therefore influence our practices, which is to say how we perform our Southern-influenced identities.

In this chapter, we argue that food is a constitutive rhetoric. We rely on various expressions of Southern food identity as explored through our rhetorical fieldwork in order to highlight the need to continue to move beyond “texts” to explore the rhetorical implications of “identificatory” experiences, such as food culture. This chapter highlights how identification with Southern food culture shapes discursive and cultural norms, that is, how we talk about and perform eating, socializing, consuming, and cooking. By showing how our identities can be shaped through the narratives that emerge from our sensory experiences, we continue to develop the line of constitutive scholarship that explicates how our identifications constitute our practices (Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, & Clark, 2011; Cordova, 2004; Jasinski, 1998, 2001; Stein, 2002). That is, as we identify with particular characteristics and groups, we are then drawn to act based on those identities. If Southern food acts rhetorically, it sends a message that can help shape identity. This chapter will focus on how food communicates, while the rest of the book will explore what Southern food communicates and the types of identities that it might form.

In theorizing about the rhetorical, constitutive nature of Southern food, descriptions of such foodways and experiences help form our understanding of this function. In addition to examples from our field research, we rely on texts produced by the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA), an institute of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. SFA is one of the most important academic groups studying Southern foodways and has been called the most “intellectually engaged” food society by the Atlantic Monthly magazine (Kummer, 2005, para. 2). Importantly, the organization provides a collection of oral histories and films designed to capture the experience of Southern cuisine. By telling the stories of the people who have helped preserve and/or revive Southern cooking, the organization offers a compelling collection of the stories. These are rhetorical texts in that they tell a particular story of Southern food—in all of its complexity—and its place in Southern culture. The films do more than that, however. As John T. Edge (SFA, “An SFA Film Primer”), director of the SFA, says of its collection of almost ninety short films:

We truly believe that these fried chicken cooks, these road crop farmers, these barbecue pit masters tell us a story about the South. We think these stories offer far more than just sustenance. We think they offer a way of thinking about race and class and gender and ethnicities—those deeply important issues that have long vexed and long defined the South.

Consequently, a look at some of the fieldwork examples that we collected, as well as a sampling of the SFA films, provides needed examples to explore the rhetorical nature of food and its constitutive possibilities. Indeed, Southern food and Southern food rhetoric such as the SFA’s invite people to define themselves through the way they eat. We first frame the constitutive rhetorical tradition in terms of these identity-building properties. We then analyze briefly some of the examples from our fieldwork experiences and a selection of filmed SFA oral histories through five sensory experiences to demonstrate how food can serve a constitutive function. Finally, we argue that identification with these sensory experiences positions particular types of discursive and material action, particularly in the case of Southern food.

CONSUMING THE CONSTITUTIVE RHETORICAL TRADITION

Constitutive Rhetoric as Identity Building

Constitutive rhetorical theory illuminates how identities are formed, performed, and move us to action. This tradition moves beyond causality, where communication scholars look at how a message causes someone to act in some specific way, to understanding how discourse “makes something possible or creates conditions of possibility” (Jasinski, 2001, p. 106). Constitutive theory asserts that communication is ongoing and full of potential, symbolically creating and recreating our identities, social relations, events and experiences, ideas, feelings, and ways of expressing them (Craig, 2000). It is interested in the creation and negotiation of meaning in society (Craig, 2000). Constitutive rhetorical approaches help explain how these traditions continue to be culturally relevant and indicative of a region’s people. As Cooren (2012) explains about the importance of understanding how communication creates culture, “for an accent or a language to live and exist, we have to make it live and exist in our interactions and discourse” (p. 6). Our words and actions not only embody our identities, but they also reify those identities. Constitutive rhetoric shows how things such as “attitudes, beliefs, traits, feelings, and emotions constantly invite themselves into our discussions through the way they animate us (in which case they are the ventriloquist and we are the dummies) and reversely, through the way we (willingly or not) ventriloquize them through our conduct and talk (in which case we are the ventriloquists and they are the dummies” (p. 10). The idea that identity is rhetorically shaped is not new, of course.

Maurice Charland (1987) is the seminal rhetorical theorist credited with arguing that a person’s identity is shaped through persuasion leading to a collective identity that helps create social change. Building on Burke’s (1950/1969) ideas about rhetoric’s ability to engender identification, he argues that constitutive rhetoric facilitates the development of an identity committed to a particular cultural movement or societal possibility because it does more than address people; it attempts to remake them by replacing one reality with another. Identification, Burke argues, allows for a feeling of shared experience, thereby strengthening persuasive messages. By talking a person’s “language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his,” the rhetor appeals to the audience and creates this sense of shared identity (Burke, p. 55; emphasis his).

The identity creation process is, in many ways, a performance. Constitutive rhetoric explains the ways in which discourse shapes identities because it helps uncover tendencies and possibilities in how the identities are formed without arguing that they are rigid or unchangeable. As a rhetoric of possibility, it allows for both the performance of a particular identity and the ability to ignore or challenge the offered subject position. Judith Butler (1990) argues, for example, that identities, and gender in particular, are not stable entities. Instead, she argues, gender should be thought of as a performance, as something that is “performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Hence … gender proves to be performative—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be … There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (pp. 24–25). Butler’s contributions to our understanding of performance have been widely used in the larger discussions about identity. Identity is constructed, according to Butler (1988), through a “stylized repetition of facts” (p. 519) or “an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities” (p. 521). Thus, the acts that we perform, the daily actions that we take, help form who we are. As Cordova (2004) notes, constitutive rhetoric “facilitates the performance of identities, not just their adoption” (p. 215).

Moving beyond identity creation and reaffirmation, however, the constitutive approach also explains how identities move us to action. Scholars employing this perspective are interested in how a metaphor, narrative, or other rhetorical device allows people to consider things in new or different ways and the ways in which “discursive practice shapes but does not completely determine the realms of the social, political, or economic” (Jasinski, 2001, p. 106). Constitutive rhetoric goes beyond identification because rhetoric is used in “constituting character, community, and culture in language” (White, 1985, p. x). It builds on Black’s (1970) understanding of how rhetoric envisions an audience, as well as Althusser’s (1971) work on interpellation and ideology. It is a rhetoric of socialization. In the act of addressing listeners (or in our case, those who experience Southern food), “an advocate’s message awakens (or energizes) certain possibilities or a specific identity (or subject position) for that audience” (Jasinski, 2001, p. 107). Importantly, it is up to the listener to conclude a story once interpellated or identified, even though there is a type of forward movement or desired outcome offered.

Many recent constitutive studies speak to the power of these collective identities. Scholars have used the perspective to examine how political identities form (Cordova, 2004; Sweet & McCue-Enser, 2010); how women come to view themselves as mothers, employees, or both (Hayden, 2011); or how citizens come to feel attached to a particular national identity (Beasley, 2002; Stuckey, 2006). Many of these studies explore the strength of the collectivity, with Hayden (2011), for example, noting how a website devoted to women seeking to be good “aunties” to their siblings’ children reinforces some harmful assumptions that underlie mothering, inviting these women to also define themselves through children. Another development in constitutive rhetoric seeks to understand how material realities create rhetorical opportunities that deserve our attention. Blair (1999), Greene (1998), and Jasinski (2001) all discuss this “constitutive materialism” whereby discourse “does more than describe the world; it creates what is real” (Jasinski, 2001, p. 119). As Selzer (1999) explains about this important line of materialist inquiry, “language is not the only medium or material that speaks” (p. 8).

As a largely celebratory discourse rooted in specific material practices (planting, cooking, eating), Southern food rhetoric provides the opportunity to build on these scholarly developments to explore the potential of a positive, affirming constitutive rhetoric, as well as the chance to further theorize the mediation between the material and rhetorical dimensions of experience. Indeed, Southern food is experiencing what Charland (1987) calls a “founding moment,” when advocates try to “interpellate” audiences into a common, collective identity. National media, for example, talk frequently about the “Southern culinary revivalist” movement (Eddy, 2013, para. 2). Founding moments require that advocates negotiate paradoxical constraints in order to turn them into resources or opportunities to work toward a particular telos; it is in these moments that advocates need to “define away the recalcitrance of the world” and offer new, fresh “perspectives and motives” (Charland, 1987, p. 142). Through the creation of the SFA, the hosting of community and academic events, and the change in the way that Southern food is interpreted and created in homes and restaurants, as well as the perception of Southern food, it is clear that the Southern food movement is motivating this interpellation. If this founding moment is successful, Southern food and the rhetoric surrounding it will emphasize the history that Southerners share and encourage dialogue. This idea will be discussed more fully in chapter two.

Emphasizing commonalities is complicated by many factors and that is especially true in the South. There are multiple societal pressures pulling people to support different allegiances; and as Dubriwny (2009) explains, identity is not a “stable essence of self but a process of becoming through texts, discourses, and ideologies” (p. 108). These different cultural forces shape the formation of identity and must be “negotiated within a particular rhetorical culture among competing political visions, already constituted subjectivities, and material circumstances” (Tate, 2005, p. 27). Even if constituted, collectivities can shift and are subjected to power that is always both limiting and enabling (Drzewiecka, 2002; Zagacki, 2007). So, Southern food rhetoric may contain possibilities, offering adherents new ways to view their relationships to food and to each other, but it must first work to constitute a collective subject that challenges these divisive individual or class interests and concerns (Charland, 1987); therefore, in appealing to listeners, “advocates must consider competing worldviews … contradictions that arise between competing identities and the narratives that constitute them” (Zagacki, 2007, p. 273). Indeed, for a collective subject position to be able to challenge the South’s racialized, classed, and gendered history is daunting, yet food seemingly carries this possibility. That is, we can celebrate our commonalities while sharing a culinary habit.

It is the stories surrounding food—the driving narratives—that seem to give food its rhetorical strength. Charland (1987) argues that constitutive rhetoric gives the illusion of freedom, which means that subjects are relentlessly driven to carry out or follow through on the narrative, what Zagacki (2007) calls “being constrained by the narrative telos of constitutive rhetoric” (p. 276). Scholars have examined the drawbacks of being locked into a particular narrative (Hayden, 2011; Stein, 2002); however, in the case of the collective subject position created by Southern food rhetoric, this process may be beneficial. An audience must be persuaded to accept the world created by the stories of Southern food, but if constituted, people may work to enact the narrative beyond sharing meals, positively altering relationships once the experience concludes. As Charland (1987) points out, “a narrative, once written, offers a logic of meaningful totality” (p. 141). Following the logic of the narrative in Southern food culture points to ways in which food, as a discourse, carries rhetorical force.

Narratives strengthen constitutive rhetoric in many ways. By employing a constitutive perspective, we are able to see Southern food as a story, or a narrative in rhetorical terms, which establishes relationships between or among things over a time period (Jasinski, 2001). These stories do more than serve an instrumental function; they contain constitutive or ideological rhetorical force that positions a culture’s social world, making “its customs, traditions, values, shared beliefs, roles, institutions, memories, or language” become second nature to members of that culture (Jasinski, 2001, p. 398). Constitutive rhetoric, in the form of narratives or other texts, performs four functions that create lived experience. Narratives can constitute subjectivity, the experience of time and temporal experience, a culture’s community and political norms, and finally, its language. Regarding constituting subjectivity, the food stories we share or tell about ourselves are constantly unfolding and changing, but “the way in which we organize, edit, and revise those stories help shape our identity, our sense of who we are as persons” (Jasinksi, 2001, p. 399). In reference to shaping the experience of time, “the meaning and significance of the past will be shaped by the narratives told about it” (Jasinski, 2001, p. 399) meaning, for example, that if a whitewashed version of Southern food predominates that ignores the contributions of black chefs and cooks, then that is the story we may come to believe. In terms of shaping political community and culture, narratives can tell the story of a community, what it is and what it is doing, “which is told, acted out, and received and accepted in a kind of self-reflective social narration” (Carr, 1986, pp. 149–50). This means, again, that if only nostalgic, mythic stories about the South are told, the community may remain resistant to change. Indeed, Jakes (2013) points out that constitutive narratives may exclude some from being part of a culture. For example, when Paula Deen tried to explain away racist behavior and comments she made to her employees, her narrative carried different constitutive force for different listeners, appealing to some and excluding others, performing a mixture of affirmation and subversion of particular Southern cultural norms (Jasinski, 2001). What some observers pointed out was that Deen built her culinary empire through historically African foods without paying homage to that history and the role that Africans, and later African Americans, pla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Stories, Subjectivities, and Spaces of Southern Food
• Part One: The Rhetorical Potential of Southern Food
• Part Two: Exploring the Southern Table
• Part Three: After-Dinner Conversation
• References
• Index