Notes on "A Manifesto: The What and How of Comparative Rhetoric"

Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, June 2013. "A Manifesto: The What and How of Comparative Rhetoric." Rhetoric Review, vol. 34, no. 4, 2013, 273-4.

I'm identifying the RSA Summer Institute as the author of this because my sense is that the participants in the summer institute wrote this together. 

The manifesto defines comparative rhetoric and lists its objects of study, its goals, and its methodologies. It's rather short, so I'm not sure I can summarize it here. I'll point out some key words (key words for me, that is) that show up and comment on them.

The definition ends with the idea of "challeng[ing] the prevailing patterns of power imbalance and knowledge production" (273). This is echoed in the "objects of study" section, which mentions "focus[ing] on practices that have often been marginalized, forgotten, dismissed as anything but rhetoric, and/or erased altogether" (273). It's also echoed in goals like "discover and/or recover under-represented and under-recognized cultures and their discursive practices" (273), and in the "methodologies" section where they suggest that comparative rhetoric "navigat[es] among and beyond ... an outright rejection of assumed parity, equivalence, difference, or similarity and a readiness for interdependence and heterogeneous resonance without eliding power imbalance" (274). So the idea of addressing power imbalances (in the form, I think, of previously ignored or undervalued cultures or communicative practices) is a major feature of this manifesto. Of course, I'm completely in favor of this focus since my focus is on Taiwan(ese) rhetoric, which needs more attention in the field, in my opinion. 

One thing that I wonder about in the "objects of study" is the focus on "communicative practices frequently originating in non-canonical contexts"--I wonder what is meant by "non-canonical." Which canon(s) are they referring to there? And what precisely is a "non-canonical context" (as opposed to a non-canonical text)? Those are a couple of things I'd like to know more about; as I've been thinking about the history of rhetorical practices in Taiwan, I've been more and more convinced that some texts that are traditionally studied as "canonical" Taiwanese literature or people who have been studied as "canonical" writers by folks in comparative literature or Taiwanese literary studies can also be seen as rhetorical texts or rhetors/rhetoricians. Does this manifesto allow for the reevaluation of texts and writers who are canonical in other disciplines?