This dissertation employs concepts of sense of place, consumption, and terroir (a French term often translated “taste of place”) to evaluate the ways that nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century representations of southern agriculture – advertisements, art, events, landscapes, and material culture – jointly promote produce and place in and beyond the American South. Reconceiving terroir as a perception of place associated with various senses (including, but not limited to, taste) that circulates via non-edible forms, the project examines how Southern promoters used representations of agricultural goods, landscapes, and workers to market four specific products from their region—North Carolina tobacco, Virginia peanuts, Florida oranges, and South Carolina rice—to consumers across the United States. I explore how various groups and individuals developed advertisements, art, events, and material culture that evoked elements of southern terroir to sell consumers fantasies of the region’s produce and attractions. By analyzing the ways that companies used visual and material representations to convey place-specific sensory qualities of food to national buyers, this project models a new approach toward understanding the localized meanings of Southern foodstuffs and expands on work in foodways studies that has focused on the material qualities of comestibles themselves. I connect the South to post-Civil War and twentieth century national advertising trends, particularly the widespread use of racist caricatures and evocations of social class, and I illustrate the pervasiveness of regional imaginings within the visual and material worlds of commodified agriculture. I also consider how representations of tobacco, peanuts, oranges, and rice created by members of the localized communities in which these products were grown creatively contributed to, reclaimed, or contested place-based identities and memories as intertwined with agricultural output. Addressing creators and consumers who have come to these products from a variety of geographic, financial, cultural, and racial backgrounds, my project demonstrates that twentieth century promotional representations of Southern produce functioned on local, regional, and national scales. Ultimately the dissertation shows that southern agricultural promotions and commemorations have long revolved around the consumption of place itself. / 2024-11-02T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/45296 |
| Date | 03 November 2022 |
| Creators | Kirby, Rachel Crockett |
| Contributors | Barrett, Ross |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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