ABSTRACT
The Eastern Food Bazaar is a covered alley in the central business district of Cape Town, South Africa packed with fast-food restaurants serving pan-Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine. The multimodal signs listing dishes from culinary traditions as diverse as Turkish, Punjabi, Chinese or Italian contain stereotypical representations of the associated cultures. This chapter discusses 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.
The chapter critically analyses a data corpus made out of all the menus displayed in the semiotic landscape of the Eastern Food Bazaar following van Leeuwen’s (2006, Towards a semiotics of typography. Information Design Journal, 14(2), 139–155. https://doi.org/10.1075/idj.14.2.06lee">https://doi.org/10.1075/idj.14.2.06lee) “semiotics of typography” approach, which focuses on typographic features such as expansion, slope, curvature, connectivity, orientation or regularity. The analysis is enriched by looking at the cultural history of such features because of their ties with colonial and orientalist imagery.
The key argument emerging from the chapter is that in a globalised tourism context, typographic choices indexing ethno-stereotypes function as accents, meeting the multilingual expectations of the tourists in search of a culinary adventure.
