Σεμινάρια της Τρίτης του ΕΕΠΓ - ΑΝΟΙΞΗ 2024

Culinary types: Culture in the typographic landscape of the Eastern Food Bazaar in Cape Town

Gilles Baro
University of the Witwatersrand

Περίληψη/ Abstract

“Eastern Food Bazaar? More like Eastern Food Bizarre!” is a phrase I overheard in the covered alley in the central business district of Cape Town, South Africa packed with fast-food restaurants serving pan-Asian and Middle-Eastern cuisine to locals and tourists. The term “bizarre”, I gauged, referred to the manner in which the cultures associated with the available cuisines are represented: cliché, stereotypical and relying on colonial and orientalist imagery to index culinary traditions as diverse as Turkish, Punjabi, Chinese or Italian. This paper will look at how these essentialised cultures and related food are inscribed in the typographic choices of the restaurants’ menus. Indeed, the scripts used are designed to index ‘foreignness’ whilst remaining readable to the English-speaking tourist and local, thus creating 'bizarre' intercultural communication.
A data corpus made out of all the menus displayed in the semiotic landscape of the Eastern Food Bazaar will be analysed following van Leeuwen’s (2006) “semiotics of typography” approach which focuses on typographic features such as expansion, slope, curvature, connectivity, orientation or regularity to address meaning in multimodal communication. The analysis will then be enriched by looking at the cultural underpinnings of such features in the vain of Campbell (2009, 2013) and Giampietro (2016) who show that looking at the historical context and material use of a typeface helps us understand the meanings it can index.
This talk aims to insert itself within current research on typography and communication (Curtin, 2015; Järlehed, 2015; Jaworski, 2015; Londoño, 2015) drawing from the pioneering work aiming to understand typographic design as a socio-semiotic communicative practice (Nørgaard, 2009; van Leeuwen, 2005; 2006).