Spycy Eyes: Towards a Visual Rhetoric of Food
Food has the
capacity to make worlds, to hold together many layers of experience at once, to
imbricate bodily affect within cultural phenomena, to instantiate the visual
within food. Indeed, food is not just a visual artifact but also a means of
visualization. The visual inheres in food as a productive possibility, which I
call spyce, the worldmaking capacity
of food. Thus far, cultural studies has not fully addressed spyce, limiting scholarship to the study
of food representation. Therefore, the unrepresentable in food, the preverbal
affects, the illegible feelings, the autonomous intuitions, is omitted from
rhetorical consideration—a blind spot in the politics of food and vision. Addressing
this gap, spyce registers our
embodied ways of seeing and knowing through food.
However,
as this dissertation insists, spyce is
not a self-consistent phenomenon; it is a highly differentiated, often
contradictory visual space. Thus, visual rhetoric exposes the politics of spyce, its reconstitution of the early
modern world economic system in John Dryden’s nationalist poem, Annus Mirabilis, its creation of race-
and food-based places in nineteenth century cookbooks, its intervention in the
global, capitalist food system in Cherríe Moraga’s play, Watsonville, or its re/figuration of gender in Chitra Divakaruni’s magic
realist novel, The Mistress of Spices,
and in the memoir cookbooks of Isabel Allende and Maya Angelou. Spyce, as emerging from the literature
of the Slow Food movement, ultimately enables a way of seeing and recombining
the multiple visualities that invest food with worldmaking power.
