Ellen Cushman, et al. "Decolonizing Projects: Creating Pluriversal Possibilities in Rhetoric, Rhetoric Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2019, 1-22. DOI: 10.1080/07350198.2019.1549402
I read these essays before, so I'm going to copy my notes from then here. (Partly because I need to make sure I read the articles I haven't read before! Also because my battery is almost dead!)
From Cushman's Introduction:
"This, our subsequent polyvocal symposium, heeds Ellen Cushman’s assertion that translingual education functions as a site for 'decolonizing knowledge' that can potentially 'level linguistic and knowledge hierarchies that always indicate imperialist legacies of thought and deed' ('Translingual' 234-35)." (p. 1) (I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "indicate" here. Point to? Index?)
"We also agree with Christie Toth who asserts that attending to concerns of settler colonial logics can 'inform understandings of the relationships between rhetoric, writing, and structures of oppression in the United States, whether or not one’s work focuses primarily on Native American issues' (497, emphasis added). In short, a decolonial approach extends far beyond Indigenous rhetorical concerns." (p. 1) (This had me wondering if this was then only applicable to the United States. I note that at least one of the essays later on is about a country other than the U.S.)
"Additionally, pluriversal possibilities must overtly resist producing sites of 'alternative' rhetoric. Categorizing 'other/ed' rhetorics as such illustrates allegiance to the notion that a totalized reality of rhetoric already exists; therefore, alternatives to that reality are the only option for making rhetoric more representative and responsive to the lived realities of all people. At worst, each alternative rhetoric risks replicating the very same epistemological hierarchies and boundaries of exclusion created by the imperial difference of Western rhetoric." (p. 2). (There's a footnote after "alternative rhetoric" that gives examples of "alternative" rhetorics, like "cultural rhetoric, African American rhetoric, Indigenous rhetoric, Chicana/o rhetoric, feminist rhetoric, comparative rhetoric, visual rhetoric, embodied rhetoric, and/or insert-your-adjective-here rhetoric" (p. 4). I have to admit that I found this list a bit dismissive of a lot of research that might use these terms--like "comparative rhetoric"! Should we not be using these terms at all, then?)
"From there, decolonial scholars move on to reveal connections and shared goals across these differences to offer alternatives to modernity, as opposed to alternative modernities (Mignolo, Darker xxviii). In the end, decolonizing rhetorics offer options, rather than alternatives, and does so in an effort to pluriversalize rhetorics without universalizing or authenticating another alternative approach to rhetoric." (p. 2). [I'm not sure of the difference between "options" and "alternatives." I also note that the sentence before that mentions "offer[ing] alternatives to modernity, as opposed to alternative modernities." To follow that formulation, should we be talking about "alternatives to rhetoric" as opposed to "alternative rhetorics"? (Not sure that works.) Is there a sense that "alternative" suggests something totalizing?]
Names "two key decolonial actions": "(1) actively delinking (that is, identifying and eschewing an expectation, an assumption, or another extant 'link' that reflects colonial legacies of power) and (2) transing (as a stance of openness that responds explicitly to Rachel Jackson’s call to attend to rhetoric’s transrhetorical quality of moving 'across multiple location categories—historical, spatial, temporal, cultural, local, regional, national, and global, as well as across differences') (305)." (p. 3)
From Rachel Jackson's essay:
"Even as the instructor of record, asking naïve and assuming questions as an outsider was not the appropriate way to gain knowledge. I had to listen closely to show respect and earn trust. I had to observe the rhetorical behavior of the Kiowa elders and students around me. I stayed quiet and served in any way I could because this is what I saw them doing and I was following their model rather than setting one. Meanwhile, I grew new eyes and ears. I learned a new language, culture, and way of communicating that respected the community space I inhabited as an outsider representing a western institution of higher learning." (p. 4) [Listening and following rather than questioning.]
"Stories enact cultural continuance in each telling, particularly to Kiowa audiences learning their meaning for the first time, as was the case for many of our students that night in class. Transrhetorically, these stories communicate new meanings across time in relation to the historical context within which they are told and the expanding audiences (such as the readers of this article) with whom they are shared. These stories inevitably convey more than the story itself; they transmit cultural values, practices, and history. They express and perpetuate Native epistemologies within the surround of colonial suppression to transmit Indigenous cultural knowledges and perspectives, even if against the odds." (p. 6)
From Annie Laurie Nichols' essay:
"It becomes vital, then, to consider not only why we listen, but how we do so. As as ethnographer, I have been trained to be as blank and passive as possible while listening. But one’s self is, in the moment of listening, in relationship with the speaker and influencing their speech. It matters that I’m a white American girl who is disarmingly friendly, speaks Russian, and shows up in rural villages in Azerbaijan in the middle of winter. It also matters that I academically profit from the conversations I have there. Who I am influences what I am told, what I hear, and how I relate to the speaker." (p. 8)
"First, the ethnographer must acknowledge their own subject position and participation in the relationship and creation of meaning. Instead of reinscribing power imbalances in my fieldnotes, I should listen as a co-creator. This means setting aside my judgments, engaging with my interlocutor as someone to learn from, and giving them my full attention. Instead of being as passive as possible, I should be as present as possible." (p. 8) [Does this contradict Jackson, or is it that they are engaged in different kinds of activities? (Nichols as ethnographer vs. Jackson as instructor?)]
"Second, the listener must delink their assumptions about who the speaker should be—who the hearer expects or wants them to be—and listen to who they are—who they constitute themselves as in that moment (Mignolo “Delinking”). Ethnographic listening is a practice of delinking because we listen not just for rhetorical devices or for meaning-making, but also for the constitution of relationships (Tompkins). If we delink our assumptions about health and listen ethnographically, we can hear how my informant is highlighting what is important to him. I asked about food, and he told me about relationships." (p. 8)
"Practically, this meant not pressing with follow-up questions, respecting the legitimacy of his answers, and continuing the conversation organically, not treating my research goals as more important than what my interlocutor wanted to share and the relationship and meanings we were building together." (p. 8) [This sounds more similar to what Jackson is suggesting.]
From Rivard's essay:
"Both of these requests represent the tribes’ position in what Quijano calls the 'colonial matrix of power' or the spheres of colonial influence and dominance left behind after formal colonial rule ended (qtd. in Mignolo, 'Delinking' 476). Tribal subjectivity and epistemology was/is being erased by the very need to have me, a non-Native academic, write about their existence and gain access to archives whose ontological framework supports the legal rhetoric of evidentiary standards." (p. 10) [Even helping is implicated in the colonial matrix of power and in delegitimizing tribal subjectivity and epistemology.]
"This erasure occurs in a number of ways including classifying history into eras that center the progress of the nation-state, clumping all Indigenous communities into a single category of 'Native American' or 'Indian,' failing to use individual tribal names, or organizing material under subject headings based on a single government or colonial leader." (p. 10) [This reminds me of the LOC and Dewey systems and how they organize knowledge from a Western perspective.]
"I also aim to de-link the concepts of archives and evidence. Such delinking work is necessary in order to make way for what Duarte and Belarde-Lewis describe as 'imagining,' which consists 'of creating figurative and literal spaces for the work of building, analyzing, and experimenting with Indigenous knowledge organization' (687)." (p. 11)
From Moulder's essay:
"Critically imagining the diplomats’ story—their worldviews, the pains they took to make themselves heard, their shared experiences of broken treaties that led them into alliance, the linguistic barriers they communicated across while travelling long distances—brings into sharp relief the anti-democratic efforts to silence them and shows how the emerging democratic government compounded their struggles to maintain the sovereignty of their nations." (p. 13) [This had me wondering how you "critically imagine" the Indigenous diplomats' side of the story...]
From Murdock's essay:
"[T]ransrhetorical methodology moves. It moves across times and spaces, and across modes and materials. Transrhetorical consideration of meaning-making not only emphasizes place-based manifestations of meaning and the rhetorical work that occurs across spaces, but also the motion and action of that work in materials." (p. 15)
From Grant's essay:
"The idea here is less on identities or that individuals act within given contextual containers. Rather, relations constitute individuals and the means available to them. As the women confront each other in this scene, not only does place speak through them, but wider ecologies of relations generate rhetorical situations, exigencies, and availabilities. To understand communicative activity in this way widens our scope to look at how individuals and things are taken up by relations rather than given representations of something else." (p. 17)
From Adams' essay:
"Here I pair two theories of imagining. Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch’s notion of critical imagination offers 'a tool' for 'hypothesizing, in what might be called "educated guessing," as a means for searching methodically, not so much for immutable truth but instead for what is likely or possible, given the facts in hand' (71). Critical imagining as a feminist rhetorical practice can be usefully extended with Emma Pérez’s theory of the 'decolonial imaginary,' which she employs as a 'rupturing' and 'interstitial space' where 'differential politics and social dilemmas are negotiated' and where scholars can work toward 'alternative[s] to that which is written history' (6)." (p. 19) [I wonder if this can be connected to what Moulder has to say.]
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