Sustainable Dwelling: Attuning to Metonymies and Revealing Spaces of Rhetorical Invention

Tyler Martinez

Advisor: Michelle LaFrance, PhD, Department of English

Committee Members: McKinley Green, Douglas Eyman

Horizon Hall, #4225, https://gmu.zoom.us/j/93604398811?from=addon
April 18, 2025, 01:00 PM to 03:00 PM

Abstract:

This dissertation develops a method of rhetorical analysis called sustainable dwelling that synthesizes across theories of rhetoric that affirm material, non-human rhetoricity as a means of revealing spaces of sustainable invention. Sustainable dwelling attunes researchers to contextual and ambient rhetorics and the metonymies between cultural and material rhetorics. The goals of sustainable dwelling are: identifying how rhetorics shape and are shaped by their enworldedness, pinpointing when and where rhetorics become unsustainable, and revealing more sustainable spaces of rhetorical invention. Cultural rhetorics, (new) material rhetorics, posthumanist rhetorics, and ecological rhetorics all affirm a fundamental rhetoricity that organizes the way the world is revealed. While these conversations are often discreet in rhetorical studies, the principal methodologies and goals of these conversations align around their investments in building more equitable and sustainable societies. Conceiving of rhetorics as contextual, ambient, and ecological, as these scholarly trajectories suggest, moves research agendas beyond outdated debates regarding the dichotomy between symbolicity and materiality and potentiates lines of inquiry concerning the vulnerabilities and resilience–the sustainability–of rhetorics themselves.

In many cultures, narratives of extinction and rhetorics of preservation circulate to name and combat the loss of language, practices, and aesthetics. Cultural critics and scholars place environmental unsustainability in a metonymic relationship with threats to cultural traditions, whether real or perceived. Cajun foodways, cuisine, and identity evidence this phenomenon—Cajun rhetorics are dense with equivocation between threats to cultural integrity posed by political pressure, cultural hybridization, social adaptation, and the material environment. Writers both Cajun and non-Cajun construct Cajun cuisine as “dying” and “disappearing” along with south Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, one of the world’s most rapidly declining ecologies. To demonstrate the potential of sustainable dwelling, I craft a historiography of Cajun foodways and cuisine, explore evidence of the metonymy between cuisine and the material environment in six texts that document and adapt Cajun culinary traditions: Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a people, 1803-1877(Brasseaux, 1992), Stir the Pot: The History of Cajun Cuisine (Brasseaux et al., 2005), Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of  Louisiana’s Cajun Coast (Tidwell 2003), Cajun Foodways (Gutierrez, 1992), Mosquito Supper Club: Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou (Martin 2020), and Bayou: Feasting through the Seasons of a Cajun Life (Martin, 2024). I find that the rhetorical metonymy between Cajun cuisine and south Louisiana’s material environment developed from colonialist cultural logics and is deployed as warrant and grounds for the erroneous alignment of Cajun identity with whiteness; these rhetorics hinder the projects of preserving Cajun culture and sustaining south Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. Along the way, I reveal opportunities to more sustainably think, be, and act Cajun.