Next up on my reading list

Taking a second look at the reading list that ChatGPT created for me (discussed here), I realized that not only did ChatGPT not actually work through the entire list of comparative rhetoric sources that I had provided, but that it also "lied" about how it had organized things. For instance, while it says it "started with some articles that introduce the concept of comparative rhetoric and translingual approaches to meaning-making, such as Cushman's "Translingual and Decolonial Approaches to Meaning Making" and Cousins' "Self-reflexivity and the Labor of Translation," it actually listed Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics first, followed by Rhetoric in Modern Japan, and then Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Hmmph.

Anyway, I've decided that after reading Culp's Articulating Citizenship, I'll read Xing Lu's Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, at least in part to get a sense of what was going on "across the pond" (from Taiwan) during the time period I'm working in. Lu's book got mixed reviews, but I'm going to try to read it with an open mind. (Michael Schoenhals described himself as "profoundly bored by what has to count as one of this century’s least successful works, so far, on a most important topic"(quite a judgement on a book published in 2004!)--at least Howard Goldblatt admitted that some might find some of his own objections to the book "churlish"!) I'm hoping this book is better than a book on language and politics in Taiwan that I never finished reading because, toward the end, I felt I was just reading a list of examples without much analysis (a "taxonomy" of language examples, basically). Wish me luck!

Notes on Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship

Culp, Robert. Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912-1940. Harvard University Asia Center, 2007.

I'm not sure where I first heard of this book, but it turned out to be very useful for thinking about my own project on Taiwan in at least two ways. One way was expected--Culp takes a close look at some of the secondary school language textbooks used in China during the period under investigation, which was something I wanted to see in order to think about how I am discussing elementary-level language textbooks in Taiwan. Culp notes a change from the earlier Republican era production of textbooks, which allowed for a range of political and social perspectives to be presented, to the post-1927 period, during which 

the Nationalist government quickly promulgated regulations requiring submission of textbooks for approval. ... Detailed curriculum standards coupled with regular review of textbooks and increasing institutional oversight led to a progressive standardization of textbooks over the course of the Nanjing decade. (p. 50)

The earlier textbooks, as Culp points out, included readings on social issues from a variety of perspectives, such as "Zhou Zuoren's descriptions of utopian socialism, Cai Yuanpei's anarchist writings on integrating work and study, Hu Shi's calls for individual autonomy, and empirical analyses of social inequalities" (p. 140). This range of perspectives was replaced after 1927 by "readings that celebrated the Nationalist Party, called for party and state guidance in gradual processes of social leveling and reform, and promoted an ideal of young people's dedicating themselves to national development and social service" (p. 148).

Culp also includes examples of student writings published in student publications to show how they were taking up the ideas expressed in their textbooks during those different periods. I'm having less success finding student writings for my project, though I have come across some. Hopefully, I'll be able to find some more examples as I continue to work on this.

The other way in which the book is useful is that it reminds me of the necessity to connect what the KMT  was doing with education in martial law era Taiwan with what it had developed in Republican China. What did the Nationalists bring over to Taiwan in terms of their literacy and civic education beliefs and practices, and how did they adapt that to the context of postwar Taiwan? How much and in what ways did they see the Taiwanese students as similar to and different from the students on the mainland? 

These are some of my thoughts about the book right now--here are a few reviews of the book that I came across, if you want more detail about Culp's arguments:

• Borthwick, Sally. Review of Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1945. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 69 no. 2, 2009, p. 443-450. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/jas.0.0028. 
• Liu, Jennifer. Review of Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1942. China Review International, vol. 18 no. 2, 2011, p. 179-182. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cri.2011.0047.
• Tsin, Michael. ROBERT CULP. Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, number 291.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center. 2007. Pp. xvi, 382. $49.50., The American Historical Review, Volume 113, Issue 5, December 2008, Pages 1500–1501, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.113.5.1500 
• Weston, Timothy. Review of Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1942. The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 68, no. 1, 2009, pp. 260–61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20619685. Accessed 28 July 2023.

Yameng Liu on "Translation and the Disciplinary Development of Rhetoric"

"Translation and the Disciplinary Development of Rhetoric" was a talk given by Yameng Liu about 12 years ago at Hong Kong Baptist University. I haven't watched the video yet, but I plan to. I'm currently reading Liu's chapter in Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks and decided to look him up through Google. I haven't been able to find any more recent information about Liu, however. 

Here's the abstract for Liu's talk:

While a rhetorical perspective on translation has started to attract scholarly attention, translation's impact on the disciplinary development of rhetoric remains unexplored by practitioners in the fields concerned. Even a cursory look into rhetoric's long history, however, would turn up much evidence of translation's crucial role in shaping up the conceptual and institutional contours of the art of persuasion. And questions such as "how key rhetorical concepts became translated from one language into another" or "when and what seminal texts were rendered available interlingually to rhetorical practitioners in different cultural contexts" actually point us to a more intelligent understanding of the way rhetoric has been constituting itself as an important area of studies. 

[Update, 1:48 p.m. Just finished watching the talk, and I found it very interesting. But the second question/comment from the audience (at around 1:27 on the video) made me a bit uncomfortable...]

Dog days of summer

My "productivity" has slowed down a bit since the beginning of the month. Though I did finish reading a book (Scott Simon's Truly Human), that was actually the result of a sleepless night after an outpatient procedure. I'm working on reading another book, Robert Culp's Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940, reference to which I came across somewhere or other last month. I haven't gotten far into it, but I think it'll be useful to me for thinking about my own project. 

Speaking of that project, I was having a lot of trouble making any progress on it recently, until my wife told me to go the library and try to do something, which I dutifully did. I managed to write about 750 usable words for a new introduction to the paper after clearing my throat for about 2000 words. It's not a complete introduction yet, but I am somewhat satisfied for how I managed to fuse a few streams of thought together to give a better sense of the "so what" of my paper. I've had a lot of trouble with the "so what," but I feel more confident about it now. (I'm sure the voices of doubt will emerge at some point, though.)

I'm also thinking about the undergraduate comparative rhetoric class that I'm supposed to propose as part of my fellowship leave project. As I mentioned earlier, I have been considering using Mary Garrett and Xiaosui Xiao's article about the Opium Wars as a course reading; this made me think about the possibility of focusing the course in terms of something like "rhetorics in contact" in contexts of imperialism, colonialism, semicolonialism, etc., rather than a course where we would just read about ancient rhetorical traditions or "treatises." Of course, the trick in doing a "rhetorics in contact" course would be leading the students through the interpretation of what was coming into contact. The Garrett/Xiao article does a good job of the interpretation; another article I can think of that does something like that is Mary Louise Pratt's article on contact zones. I'll have to see what other examples I might find of this approach, if I decide to take it. Suggestions are welcome!

So my dog days are not a complete loss; I'm getting a bit done, just more slowly and more piecemeal than I'd like. But slow progress is better than no progress, I suppose.

Notes on Scott E. Simon, Truly Human

Simon, Scott E. Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa. University of Toronto Press, 2023.

This isn't going to be a full-on review of Simon's book. I want to mention one thing about it that I found interesting, given what I've been reading this summer about decolonizing comparative rhetoric (part of Simon's project involved decolonizing anthropology).

While I was reading this book, I came across an article by Dominique Salas, "Decolonizing Exigency: Settler Exigences in the Wisconsin Winnebago Mission Home," from Rhetoric Society Quarterly. One of Salas' arguments is about how the settler colonialists who were running a school for Native American in  nineteenth century Wisconsin were "manipulating time" as part of their project of making the students see themselves as part of the colonialist Christian history. That is, the Indigenous peoples' history becomes part of the church's history of the working out of the Christian God's plan for the world. This manipulation of chronos allows the settlers to ignore settler colonialism as the problem/exigency and treat the Indigenous people themselves as needing to grow or develop as part of the (settler) Christian society. The manipulation of time and the exigency treats the Indigenous people as sharing a common heritage with the white settlers, while at the same time viewing them as children in need. 

After reading this article, I was struck by Scott Simon's depiction of the role of Christianity among the Indigenous Sediq in Taiwan because he also discusses the change in orientation toward time (and space) that resulted from the Christianization of Indigenous Taiwan. Simon casts this, however, in terms of churches "help[ing] orient individuals in time" (p. 188). He writes, 

Due to the annual cycles of biblical readings, people can imagine themselves as part of a human history progressing from the creation of the earth, through the fall of Adam and Even, the tribulations of Jewish prophets, redemption through Christ, and finally to a promised messianic future for all. Many Presbyterian pastors combine these teachings with traditional myths; for example, where the first man and the first woman emerged from a giant boulder called Pusu Qhuni, is the actual site of the Garden of Eden. Others embed their own history within the timeline of Christianity, contrasting the headhunting past to their post-conversion lives. (p. 188)

As Simon argues, comparing the Indigenous experiences of Christianity in Taiwan to that of his native Canada, "Christianity and colonialism are intertwined in history... . Taiwan is unique only because that historical process is refracted through a very different history of Japanese and Chinese colonialisms" (p. 191). While agreeing that there are culturally imperialist aspects of Christianity in Taiwan, he points out that "[i]n some ways, conversion [to Christianity] is a clever strategy by the least powerful in the society to seek alliances with even more powerful outsiders. Conversion can thus also be a way of seizing agency, of maintaining the host position in the mountains rather than conceding territory to Han-controlled Buddhist monasteries or Taoist temples that are often built on mountains in China or in non-Indigenous parts of Taiwan" (pp. 191-2). 

The idea of agency is important here, I think, because it moves us away from thinking about only what the colonizers are/were doing and to thinking about what the Indigenous people might be doing with what they encounter. It reminds me of Mary Louise Pratt's discussion of "transculturation," in which "members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by dominant or metropolitan culture" (p. 36). As she notes, "While subordinate peoples do not usually control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what gets absorbed into their own and what it gets used for" (p. 36). In the case of the Sediq, as Simon points out, they have used one cultural form from the "metropole" to balance that with the pressures coming from other dominant cultures (the Japanese during that period and the Han since 1945). (I should add that Salas states specifically that in her article she focuses on "the reality the settler has crafted not to bypass Indigenous agency and sovereignty but to elaborate on the totalizing force of settler time" [p. 109]. As she notes, Indigenous voices "have largely been reduced to silence" in the archival record [p. 109].)

Anyway, that's just one small point that came from reading this book and thinking about it in relation to other texts I've been reading. There's a lot more going on in this book, and I probably can't do it justice. My suggestion is that you read it yourself. It's well worth the investment of time!

* See also what Jonathan Clements has written about the book.

Notes on Mary Garrett & Xiaosui Xiao, "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited"

Garrett, Mary, and Xiaosui Xiao. "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited." Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 2, 1993, pp. 30-40. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3885923

Somehow they managed to spell Garrett's name wrong in the article, spelling it Garret instead, which makes it tough to see how many times the article has been cited because you have to look it up both with her name written correctly and with it misspelled. Anyway, it seems this article has been undercited, which is a shame because I think it's a very useful contribution to the discussion of rhetorical situations. I read it a long time ago, but I'm revisiting it myself because I thought it might be good for my comparative rhetoric course. 

Garrett and Xiao are using the case of the Qing Dynasty's response to the Opium Wars to add to the discussion of rhetorical situations. As I mentioned in my "Formosa Translated" paper, the rhetorical situation, as first conceptualized by Lloyd Bitzer, saw rhetorical acts as emerging from a rhetor's recognition of an exigence--an outside event or situation--that called for action in the form of speech. As Richard Vatz saw it, however, the exigence was not coming from outside but was actually created by the rhetor. In either case, however, the rhetor--the speaker--was the main focus of the rhetorical act and the actor in the rhetorical situation.

Garrett and Xiao argue that the audience and what they call the "discourse tradition" have more of a role in the rhetorical situation than the speaker does. According to them, 

The audience is ... the pivotal element which connects the rhetorical exigency (the audience's unsolved questions), the constraints (the audience's expectations), and the rhetor (as a member of the audience). With this shift the debate over the facticity of the exigency loses much of its force since the important question becomes whether the audience accepts that an exigency exists. (p. 39)

In terms of the discourse tradition, they argue that how (or if) an exigency is perceived by the audience is largely dependent on "what audiences will accept as the appropriate forms of discourses, the proper styles, and the right modes of argumentation in relation to certain topics and contexts" (p. 37). These in turn are conditioned (if not determined) by the how similar issues have been addressed in the past. In the case of the Qing response to the Opium Wars, Garrett and Xiao argue that the discourse tradition regarding foreign relations, which consisted mainly of viewing foreigners as barbarians that needed to be managed or sinicized, resulted in a delay in the Qing court's recognition that the Western incursion on China was "unprecedented." While some literati-officials did try to warn the government of the seriousness of the situation, most officials saw it in terms of previous Chinese-foreign relations. 

It wasn't until after the second Opium War that more officials started to argue that the Western powers were not content to be allowed to trade and be treated like like tribute states. Garrett and Xiao quote official Li Hongzhang, who wrote that "[t]he Westerners ... profess peace and friendship, but what they really want is to seize and possess China. If one country creates trouble with us, others will stir up conflict. This is a truly unprecedented situation [ch[u]angju] in the past several thousand years" (p. 35). This recognition led to self-strengthening movements of various types in response to the newly recognized situation.

However, it's not entirely clear from the authors' discussion what exactly changed that allowed the officials to recognize a different exigency than the one that had originally been shaped by the discourse tradition. There are a few possibilities, judging from the article. One is that the "open-minded Prince Gong ... [who] was the earliest member of the royal family to acknowledge the changing situation of China" (p. 35). He helped to create what Garrett and Xiao call a "proto-Foreign Office" (the Zongli Yamen), whose officials helped change the perception of what was going on. There were also other "[s]igns of dynastic decline" happening that suggested serious problems in Qing China. Even so, the authors point out that there was a debate between the self-strengtheners and the more traditional Neo-Confucian scholar-officials regarding how to respond to the "unprecedented situation." While the self-strengtheners called for changes in administrative practices and study of Western knowledge, the Neo-Confucians stressed moral cultivation as an answer to the problems facing China. 

One question I'm having here is similar to the "classic" question regarding discourse communities--how strong are the boundaries that contain the members of the discourse community or the discourse tradition? Do changes in the discourse tradition or the discourse community have to be occasioned by attacks from the "outside" (such as the Western incursions on China in the mid-1800s)? In the case of China, this probably also involves the debate over the "response to the West" thesis of historians like John King Fairbank. (See this essay for a summary of some of the debate.) In terms of the rhetorical situation, how does a rhetor, as a member of the audience (as Garrett and Xiao posit it) step outside of the discourse tradition to propose a new way of seeing (or creating) the exigency? 

Another question that I'm thinking about, in light of what I've been reading about decolonizing comparative rhetoric, is whether the "rhetorical situation" (however it's construed) is a universal concept that can be used to discuss rhetorical practices in non-Western cultures without fear of imposition of Western concepts on non-Western contexts. And how does the concept of discourse traditions fit into this, in the case of Garrett and Xiao's discussion? Is it also a universally applicable concept? One idea that comes to mind here is if there are variations in how strong discourse traditions are in different cultures or contexts. (This might dangerously lead to generalizations about "conservative" cultures as opposed to cultures more open to change.) Also, in the authors' discussion of discourse traditions, topoi figure in as a "key element"--is the concept of topoi universal (whereas the actual topoi themselves might vary according to context or culture)? I'm inclined to think that these three concepts (rhetorical situations, discourse traditions, and topoi) could be considered important parts of rhetorical practices in most contexts, while the forms that they take or the meaning of them might vary. 

One final thought is that I wish Jenny Edbauer's 2005 essay on rhetorical ecologies had engaged this article. In their conclusion, Garrett and Xiao point out that "viewed diachronically, the rhetorical situation is an ever-changing spiral of interactions among entities and groups which shift roles and shape each other even when in opposition" (pp. 39-40). This does not seem far from Edbauer's argument.