Food as Greekness: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of the Rand Daily Mail, 1960–1985

Abstract

Following the discovery of gold, Johannesburg became a major destination for immigrants from across the world. Immigrants from Greece, Cyprus and the established Greek community in Egypt were among those who flocked to Johannesburg in the early 20^th century, establishing the city as the epicentre of the Greek diaspora in South Africa. The archive of the Rand Daily Mail, a Johannesburg-based newspaper that ran from 1902 until 1985, provides interesting instances of discourse by and about Greek South Africans spanning their early days to their status as one of the largest European diasporas in the country. In a first effort to locate Greek culture in Johannesburg and investigate how Greekness is discursively constructed, this study presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis of the Rand Daily Mail articles mentioning Greeks or Greece that appeared from 1960 until the newspaper’s end in 1985 – a period during which the Greek community in Johannesburg was at its peak in terms of numbers. Articles in the Rand Daily Mail consistently construct Greece, and Greek cultural identity, as inextricable from food, which indicates that food is the fulcrum of Greek culture, or ‘Greekness’, in Johannesburg.