Another new book in the former native speaker's library

Christopher Joby, Christian Mission in Seventeenth-Century Taiwan: A Reception History of Texts, Beliefs, and Practices, Brill, 2025.

This attractively bound (but super-expensive!) book made its way to me from Lahore, and unwrapping it from its tight multilayered plastic covering reminded me of when Kasper Gutman was tearing the layers of newspaper off the Maltese Falcon. 

Fortunately, I can confidently declare that it's not a fake, and I'm looking forward to reading it. The Dutch encounter with Taiwan is particularly interesting to me for its rhetorical dimensions, and Joby's book appears to address at least one side of it by discussing what rhetorical techniques Dutch and Spanish missionaries used to persuade (or coerce?) the Indigenous Austronesians in seventeenth-century Taiwan to adopt (or was it adapt?) Christianity.

But first I need to get back to work...

Kerr paper revision sent off!

I just sent off my revision of my paper on the "pre-life" of George H. Kerr's Formosa Betrayed. The editor might require more revisions, but I thought that I should send him something since it has been over a year since I last contacted him. Sorry!

I also got the proofs for my review of Xiaoye You's Genre Networks and Empire yesterday and responded to them. I'm looking forward to seeing it in print! (The link is to some preliminary thoughts about the book, some of which I developed in the review.)

Now on to my grading...

Review of Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms published

My review of Resistance in the Era of Nationalisms: Performing Identities in Taiwan and Hong Kong, edited by Hsin-I Cheng and Hsin-i Sydney Yueh is out. It was a pleasure to read this book, particularly realizing the risks some of the authors took in writing it.

A few reflections on the "Rhetorics in Contact" course

Back in August, I wrote about my plans for the new course I was going to be teaching, "Rhetorics in Contact." Now that the course is over, I want to reflect on the course and think about what I might do better next time. In no particular order:

• I think the readings worked well. As we read and responded to them, we actually started finding connections that I hadn't noticed before. Shimabukuro's book was particularly good for bringing together a lot of points that we had discussed earlier, though often she would use different language for talking about similar kinds of concepts. I personally gained a lot from reading through her book again for the course.
• Here's something I posted on BlueSky about Shimabukuro's book and current events. (Hope you can read it!)
• We used Perusall for "socially annotating" the readings. It made things nice generally, but in the case of Shimabukuro, I was a little annoyed that the Perusall edition of the book didn't have any page numbers. It made it harder to cite the book when we were working on final papers. Haven't yet figured out a workaround for the next time, so any suggestions are welcome!
• Maybe because we were using Perusall and doing social annotation (and maybe for some other reasons, as well), class discussions weren't as active as I had hoped. I think I have to work harder next time on making sure class time is better used, and I'm not just doing most of the talking.
• We did a few informal writing assignments that I liked. I think I want to keep most of them and perhaps do a few more. After we read Garrett and Xiao's "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited," for instance, I asked students to write about any discourse traditions in their families or cultures. Their responses were interesting. (And I had fun writing my own response, too!) We also did some practice analysis of materials in NU's Digital Collections. I also had them write some reflections on their class trips to the archives. 
• I think I need to do a bit more with helping them on the archival projects. (One student suggested starting earlier, but I have to think about that. Maybe we could go to the archives earlier.) More class time devoted to them bringing in archival materials and challenges they were facing would be useful, perhaps. And more work with citing archival documents. 
• I also should do a bit more with helping them think about connections between the readings and the archival collections they were working on. One student in their final reflection pointed out how working on the archives helped them better understand the concepts from the readings, but I think I could do a bit more to help in that direction. 

Anyway, overall the course went well (aside from problems with class discussions or lack thereof), so I'm encouraged to try teaching this again if I get the chance!

"Rhetorics in Contact" and August mushroom hunts

We're just a few days away from the beginning of the semester, and I've been feverishly working at getting my new "Rhetorics in Contact" course together. Right now it's a pretty small group of students (it's a freshman-level course in the Honors Program), but a few more people might trickle in before classes start next Wednesday, I hope.

My course description asks, 

What happens when people try to communicate persuasively with each other across cultural boundaries? How do participants’ histories, traditions, and communication patterns shape cross-cultural encounters, and how do those encounters shape future communication within and across cultures? 

In this course, we’ll be looking at different examples of how rhetorical traditions or legacies affect communication across cultural boundaries and how cross-cultural encounters are represented differently by the participants. Through the course readings, we’ll be developing a specialized vocabulary for talking about intercultural rhetoric and thinking about methods for studying it. We’ll go on to apply some of these methods to documents in the Special Collections of the Northeastern Archives, analyzing the discourses of social organizations and movements in Boston, such as the Chinese Progressive Association and the movement to desegregate Boston’s public schools. We’ll also reflect on how rhetoric across cultures affects (or should affect) advocacy in the complex global and local contexts that we currently face.

Because we're going to be working with the archives a lot, I'm not having us read a lot of different articles. Our reading list for the semester is as follows (links to relevant blog posts):

• Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone." Profession, 1991, pp. 33-40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25595469. (Although this isn't technically a rhetoric article, many of the concepts that Pratt discusses--like contact zones, autoethnography, transculturation, etc.--are very relevant to intercultural rhetorical studies.)
• Garrett, Mary, and Xiaosui Xiao. "The Rhetorical Situation Revisited." Rhetoric Society Quarterly,  vol. 23, no. 2, 1993, pp. 30–40. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3885923. (See my discussion of the article in this post.)
• Gaillet, Lynée Lewis. "Archival Survival: Navigating Historical Research." Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition, edited by Alexis E. Ramsey, et al., Southern Illinois University Press, 2010, pp. 28-39. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/4176. (Although this chapter is more aimed at graduate students and PhD-level scholars in rhetoric and composition, I think much of the discussion can be useful for undergraduate honors students, as well. For instance, when Gaillet discusses grant applications, I ask students (in Perusall) to consider what kinds of undergraduate research grants are offered at Northeastern. I think this could be useful to them in their future work.)
• Shimabukuro, Mira. Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration, University Press of Colorado, 2015. (This will be interesting because I have to admit, rereading the book to annotate it on Perusall, it's pretty challenging in places. But see my discussion of the book here for my reasons for using this fascinating study.)

Other than these readings, students will be focusing a lot on exploring NU's Special Collections and settling on a collection or collections to focus on. One thing I'm trying to do with this assignment is stretch their ideas of what academic research is. Gaillet quotes the late compositionist Robert Connors as saying, "[A]rchival reading is ... a kind of directed ramble, something like an August mushroom hunt" (qtd. in Gaillet 38). Although the topics we'll be covering (and uncovering) in the course are serious (sometimes deadly serious), I also want students to experience archival research as a joyful (but sometimes depressing!) and exciting (but sometimes tedious!) process.

Review of A World of Turmoil published

My review of Stephen J. Hartnett's book, A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War, is out in the latest issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs. (Although the issue is dated Fall, 2023, it was published almost a year later!)

While I had a few problems with Hartnett's conclusions and recommendations, I found the book to be a valuable overview of the roles of communication and rhetoric in the history of US-China-Taiwan relations from a Taiwan-sympathetic rhetoric scholar.

Six new books in the former native speaker's library

I have some money left over from my professional development fund for this fiscal year, so I bought a few more books that I thought might be helpful to my research.* Here they are:

• Haunted Modernities: Gender, Memory, and Placemaking in Postindustrial Taiwan, by Anru Lee (2023)
  I read the introduction and part of the first chapter, and I'm already hooked! I just finished Niki Alsford's Taiwan Lives, and I think this will be the next book in my collection that I read.  
  
  
• Making Punches Count: The Individual Logic of Legislative Brawls, by Nathan F. Batto and Emily Beaulieu (2024)
  This seems particularly timely, considering the fights that went on in Taiwan's Legislative Yuan recently.
  
  
• Rhet Ops: Rhetoric and Information Warfare, edited by Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson (2019)
  After Hart-Davidson's recent death, I read an obituary that mentioned this book. It looked interesting.
  
  
• Guiguzi, China's First Treatise on Rhetoric: A Critical Translation and Commentary, trans. Hui Wu (2016)
  I've already read C. Jan Swearingen's "wide-ranging" chapter from the book, but I think I should read the whole translation.
  
  
• Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan, by Jonathan Clements (2024)
  This looks like a good readable book about Taiwan, possibly useful in an introductory course.
  
  
• Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Taiwan, ed. Gunter Schubert (2016)
  One of these days, I'd like to get access to the Encyclopedia of Taiwan Studies Online, but this also looks like a useful reference.

Buying all these books has me wondering, though, what I'll do with them down the line. I've been following Kurt Bell on Twitter recently; he and his wife are retiring and moving to Japan. They decided that they could only take a total of 6 boxes of belongings with them, and this has me thinking about what I'll do with all my books if I get to that point in life. Maybe I can eventually donate these books to a library or organization (or person?) interested in Taiwan. Anyway, I think I have a few years before I get to that point. 

*Or something like that.

Notes on Hsin-i Sydney Yueh, Identity Politics and Popular Culture in Taiwan

Hsin-i Sydney Yueh, Identity Politics and Popular Culture in Taiwan: A Sajiao Generation. Lexington Books, 2017.

A while back (OK, it was over three years ago--how the time flies!), I was asking some questions about sajiao (撒嬌) and Taike (台客) in response to an article on Taiwanese communication modes by Todd Sandel. This book by Hsin-i Sydney Yueh goes a long way towards answering those questions (and questions I didn't even know I had) about the these two Taiwanese concepts. As usual, here I'm not so much giving a formal review of the book as I am noting down some thoughts and questions that I have after reading it. (I'll link to some reviews below.)

Here are the two questions I had: 

Is sajiao, which Sandel characterizes as a practice "associated with 'Mainlanders,'" not practiced as much by non-Mainlander Taiwanese? Is it practiced much in China? 

Have the concepts of hen Tai (很台) and Taike (台客) become points of pride for Taiwanese? 

From what I got from Yueh's book, sajiao, which she describes as "embod[ying] a set of communicative acts that express the vulnerability and helplessness of the actor through imitating a child's immature behavior" (2), is not so much a Mainlander-vs.-Taiwanese (or waishengren vs. benshengren) phenomenon as it is a Northern Taiwan (specifically Taipei) vs. Southern Taiwan (south of Taipei, I guess) phenomenon. That is to say, sajiao seems to be most successfully performed by Taipei residents and appears to be connected to what Yueh characterizes as "Taipei Chic." Taipei Chic represents a form of cultural capital characteristic of how people in Taipei are represented in the media (especially talk shows)--as "urban, fashionable, and middle-class" people with "standard" Mandarin accents (144-145). This is placed in opposition to Taike and Taimei, which present a "local, rural, and working-class ... image" (144). Taike and Taimei (Yueh focuses on Taimei because she's interested in Taipei Chic vs. Taimei when it comes to women performing sajiao) appear to be from southern Taiwan and usually speak Mandarin with a Taiwanese accent. According to the media representations of Northerners and Southerners that Yueh cites, being able to sajiao is not part of Southern Taiwanese women's repertoire. 

It should be noted, as Yueh points out, that not all people who embody "Taipei Chic" are originally from Taipei, but that it's more of a style of behavior and speaking that one has to learn in order to "pass" as a Taipei person. It should also be noted that not all Taipei people (women) can be "Taipei Chic." as Yueh puts it, 

The Taipei Chic female's uniqueness lies in a constructed scarcity, in comparison to other Taiwanese (such as taike, and taimei). According to these talk shows, people who live in Taipei are not automatically Taipei Chic. In other words, the geographic location is not sufficient to fulfill the Taipei Chic image. The Taipei Chic identity is a collective standard, aiming to discern the non-Taipei Chic and expel any such people from the group. Many people who have not obtained the ticket ot enter the group strive to become more similar to Taipei Chic. (155)

In answer to my second question, Yueh's book suggests that while the idea of identifying as Taike can be a point of pride for men, women identified as Taimei--at least ones who show up on talk shows--don't necessarily appreciate that appellation, though this appears to be true mainly in contexts where the concept or term is used by Taipei people to judge people from the south. 

Something that Yueh doesn't mention (at least not that I remember) is that, as I understand it, Taipei's population is more "mainlander-dense" than the southern parts of Taiwan. In that sense, it seems to me that the adulation of Taipei Chic and the deprecation of Taike and Taimei might have some of its roots in the historical waishengren perspective on benshengren that the martial law government encouraged (or perhaps instigated). Sandel suggests this in the article I mentioned above, when he associates sajiao with Mainlanders. (At some point I need to read this review of Yueh's book by 莊佳穎, who brings up the Taiwanese concept of sai-nai [司奶] and compares it to Yueh's discussion of sajiao--h/t to Shao-wei Huang for sending me a copy of that article!)

Another point that interested me about Yueh's book was her last chapter, which moves the discussion of sajiao, Taipei Chic, and Taimei from a more interpersonal and mediatized domestic context to the larger context of what these phenomena have to say about Taiwanese identity in relation to Asia. She extends the interpersonal to the political, arguing that elements of sajiao practice have become part of domestic democratic politics in Taiwan. For instance, "Taiwan's political campaigns are full of cute marketing" (173). We see examples of this now, with vice-presidential candidate Hsiao Bi-khim calling herself a "cat warrior" and arguably even former presidential candidate Terry Gou using a "cute" English slogan "Good Timeing," which sounds similar to his Chinese name, Guo Taiming 郭台銘, (not sure why he kept the "e" in "Timeing"--maybe that makes it cuter?). 

Yueh also casts Taiwan's role in world politics in terms of a sajiao position, suggesting that Taiwan's relative weakness in comparison to China could lead to a a re-situating of Taiwan "as a small entity in terms of the global civic society" rather than a part of a "cultural China framework" (174). She suggests that Taiwan could be treated and studied in a transnational Asian context, which would remove the historical burden that Taiwan had during the Cold War to represent "Chinese culture" to the world. 

There's a lot more going on in this book than my notes here might suggest, so I'd of course recommend reading it to see what I've missed!

I didn't find many reviews of the book, but here are a couple of links in addition to the review I mentioned above:

• Thoughts on Sajiao (by Kerim Friedman)
• A review in the International Journal of Taiwan Studies (by Amélie Keyser-Verreault) (will download directly)

Notes on Mira Shimabukuro, Relocating Authority

Shimabukuro, Mira. Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration. University Press of Colorado, 2015. 

I read this book to see whether it would be good for the comparative rhetoric/"rhetorics in contact" course I'm developing. At first, I was thinking of just finding a chapter that I could use from it, but after reading the book, I think I'd be more interested in assigning the whole book. It's good for students to see how the author develops an overall argument or perspective as she works out the implications of her study, and I appreciate especially how reflective Shimabukuro is about her research and how the topic of her book connects to various aspects of her life. 

A few other thoughts about the book that I think recommend it for my course (or for others to read it!):

• There's the exemplary way that she uses Japanese rhetorics/concepts together with rhetorics of Americanness in analyzing the rhetorical/literacy practices of the Japanese American internees. For instance, in chapter 6, she describes the writing/rewriting of a petition made by Japanese mothers to suspend the conscription of their Japanese American sons. (At the time, as Shimabukuro explains, the Issei, or first-generation, mothers were not allowed to become US citizens, but their sons, who were Nissei, or second-generation, were American citizens.) Shimabukuro shows how the mothers' petition combines the rhetoric of the "dutiful wife, intelligent mother" (ryosai-kenbo) that had become an important gender discourse during the Meiji era with rhetorics of American citizenship (and even what she calls "proto-model minority" rhetoric) to argue that the Japanese mothers had raised good American sons who deserved better than to be incarcerated in the "internment camps," only to be called up to fight for a country that didn't give them or their families the rights due American citizens. I like how Shimabukuro shows the nuance of the rhetorics in contact here, even showing how the idea of ryosai-kenbo is not some sort of timeless Japanese concept, but that it was a more recent phenomenon itself--and that it connected to the problematic "nation-unifying and empire-building efforts taking place in Japan" (180). 
  
  
• I also like the way that Shimabukuro shows that the effects of these literacy activities stretch across time and intertwine with other literacy activities and rhetorical practices. As she points out, much of the writing that she discusses wasn't "successful" in the immediate sense of changing the mind of the US government. In the case of the mothers' petition, their Japanese American sons were still drafted, and the mothers only received a perfunctory response from Eleanor Roosevelt. (Oh, how you have gone down in my estimation, Mrs. Roosevelt!) In the case of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee's "Manifesto," in which they stated that they would refuse induction, the writers ended up in prison. But Shimabukuro demonstrates how these and other writings, including "private" writings such as poems written by internees, resurfaced or were brought back to the surface years later and served as models or inspiration for latter-day Asian American civil rights activists. She sees the recirculation of these texts as a kind of "relocated literacy" (196, emphasis in original), where there's a "reactivation of that rhetorical-activist force by Japanese American activist-descendants operating in contexts in which the Nikkei community has grown stronger" (196, emphasis in original).
  
  
• Shimabukuro also brings up the concept of "resistant capital," citing Tara Yosso--it's meant to be considered in opposition to Bourdieu's idea of "cultural capital," and it signifies "knowledges and skills fostered through oppositional behavior that challenges inequality" (Yosso 80, qtd. in Shimabukuro 199). It appears that Yosso primarily has in mind communities of color in the US, but I wonder if it could apply in other places, too, such as (of course) Taiwan.  
  
  
• Part of the book is a narrative of Shimabukuro's family's (particularly her father's) involvement in Japanese American activism, and by extension it traces the author's own process of developing her research project. I think this makes it more accessible for undergraduates who can thereby see how she did the research rather than just reading the results of that research. It also shows that you can be passionate about your topic and that it can grow from your own experiences, so perhaps it's an angle on doing academic work that they might not be familiar with. 

So I think I've talked myself into using this book in my course, if I get to teach it. It can also tie into a possible archival project I plan to have students do in the course. Coincidentally, Northeastern's Asian American Studies program is hosting a symposium called "Remember! Asian Americans and the Archive" on November 17, which I've signed up to attend.

[Update, 5/17/24: Here's a book talk by Shimabukuro from 2017.]

"Sabbatical" update

I noticed that I haven't posted anything yet this month, so I thought I should let my reader know that I'm still working on the projects I'm supposed to be doing this semester. I just sent a draft of my paper to my "mentor" (I'm calling him this; not sure he'd agree with the terminology!). The paper is still a bit of a mess--there's too much I want to say in it and a lot I haven't said. But I thought I should get someone else's view of it before I continue working on it.

I also need to work on the proposal for the comparative rhetoric course I'm planning. It has taken the form of a course in "rhetorics in contact" (as in contact zones), where we would look at situations in which two (or more) groups' discursive practices figure into the kinds of interactions those groups have. I have to read more for this to figure out how I might develop a course of this type.

I'm also working on finishing When They Were Not Writing Novels (【他們沒在寫小說的時候】), which I might have something to say about once I've read the last chapter. So stay tuned...

Notes on A-chin Hsiau, Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan

A-chin Hsiau, Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan: Youth, Narrative, Nationalism. Columbia University Press, 2021.

It's taken me a while to do some writing about this book because I'm not sure how I feel about it. I read five reviews of it that are generally quite positive, from Tanguy Lepesant, Scott Simon, Ming-sho Ho, Evan Dawley, and James Baron. (If you want to get an overall summary of the book, take a look at some of these reviews. I think Lepesant's and Baron's are not behind a paywall.) 

I appreciated the book because of its perspectives on the literary discussions and debates going on during the 1960s and '70s in Taiwan. I particularly appreciated the many long quotations (translated into English) from a variety of literary figures from postwar Taiwan. Hsiau ties these quotations and figures together into an argument that Taiwan's intellectuals (mostly, though not exclusively, represented in the book by writers in the literary field) moved from viewing themselves as part of the Chinese nation to viewing themselves as Taiwanese, in contradistinction to the Chinese nation. Rather than viewing this transition from an "instrumentalist" perspective, which would suggest that writers decided whether to express themselves as Chinese or Taiwanese depending on which form of identification would help their interests, or from an "essentialist" perspective, which would suggest that writers were always Taiwanese and only pretended to be "Chinese" until it was safe to express their true selves, Hsiau takes a narrative view. In this view, over the generations, writers responded to historical events like the movement to "protect the Diaoyutai islands" (保釣運動), the ROC's loss of its UN seat, etc., by rethinking their relationship with Taiwan and the ROC. As Hsiau says in the conclusion, 

Rather than a fit for an essence, or an instrument for advancing some collective's interest, I view narrative as an embodiment of human understanding that shapes human understanding and emotion in new ways with each generation. The perspective of narrative identity that I have adopted throughout this book could be described as interpretive. Historical narrative for political agents is interpretive in that it is a means of understanding the self in social and temporal context. It is a way of constructing collective identity and motivating praxis. Rather than an essence, there is a set of materials, to which new materials are continually being added, that is used to construct identity anew when the need for new kinds of action arises. There are indeed interests, but they are not calculated coldly; they are instead judged in the warmth of the chapters of the xin, the heard-and-mind that Chinese philosophers have been trying to understand since antiquity. On this understanding, it will not do for us to simply disbelieve the constant apparently heartfelt declarations of Chinese national identity in texts from the return-to-reality generation throughout the 1970s. We have to consider the possibility that if a person says he or she feels Chinese, he or she is at that moment in time. (171-2)

This quote, I think, encapsulates Hsiau's argument, and there's a part of me that agrees with him. Hsiau puts at least some of the responsibility for the "apparently heartfelt declarations of Chinese national identity" on "the power of ideological dissemination" through the educational system. As Kenneth Burke wrote in A Rhetoric of Motives, "[e]ducation ('indoctrination') exerts ... pressure upon ... [a person] from without" and that person "completes the process from within. ... Only those voices from without are effective which can speak in the language of a voice within” (39). The challenge in Taiwan, as the KMT government perceived it, was to make the voice within echo, or speak the language of, the voices from without. 

I'm reminded of a story Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) told about a performance she and her university classmates were preparing for in 1972 upon the occasion of the National Assembly’s re-election of Chiang Kai-shek to yet another term as president. As Lung wrote, 

My deepest memory was about the sentiment of comradeship felt by that bunch of 20-year-olds creating and working day and night, and we walked out in the middle of the night under the moonlit parasol trees to feel the silence of nature, the dreams of our people and the tranquility of the universe. We had no idea what "the leader" was up to, and we had no idea at that moment of youthful romance, a university student had been arrested, detained, interrogated and then sentenced to life in prison for "reading the wrong things" and "saying the wrong things."

Our gestures were exaggerated, our speech tones were artificial, our orations were stuffed with the learned wills of the adults, our emotions were sincere, our beliefs were earnest and our motives were pure, and that was because we had no idea that the most sorrowful darkness was hidden in the shadows of the parasol trees. (translation by Roland Soong)

As I wrote in my doctoral dissertation (many years ago!), Lung's reflections are a reminder that presenting government-approved thoughts with exaggerated gestures and artificial tones does not always negate the possibility of there being sincere emotions motivating the speaker. Yet at the same time, the presence in Lung’s story of the arrested university student is a reminder that not everyone had been convinced by what the schools and society had taught them. Because of this, I'm not sure that I can completely accept Hsiau's conclusions--his argument about the naiveté of  the instrumentalist and essentialist explanations for the Chinese Nationalist rhetoric and its transformation into Taiwanese nationalist rhetoric seems a bit overstated. 

When writing about Yeh Shih-t'ao's (葉石濤) earlier and later literary criticism, Chu Yu-hsun, in When They Were Not Writing Novels (【他們沒在寫小說的時候】), notes that from today's perspective, Yeh's earlier use of sentences like "Taiwan literature is part of Chinese literature" (台灣文學是中國文學的一部分), and "nativist literature is the literature of the Three People's Principles" (鄉土文學就是三民主義文學) would be annoying--and surprising, given Yeh's later Taiwan-centric perspective. Chu points out, however, that Yeh had been jailed by the KMT, which influenced his perspective on how to write. As Chu argues, looking at Yeh's rhetorical organization, after reciting a "party-state mantra," Yeh would follow up with the real point: "but in the context of Taiwan's natural environment and historical background, Taiwanese literature has developed a unique style..." (但是在台灣的自然環境和歷史背景下，台灣文學...形成了獨特的風貌......). The real point for Yeh, Chu argues, was about the locality and indigeneity of Taiwanese literature, but this was something he had to make less obvious, given the martial law context he was writing in. Hsiau would call this, probably, an example of an "essentialist" argument that Yeh was always Taiwan-centric but hid it until he could feel safe expressing it. Be that as it may, Chu's interpretation seems valid to me.

On a related point, this is where I agree with Tanguy Lepesant's critique that Hsiau should have spent more time discussing his methods. I also found Hsiau's explanation of how he was using discourse analysis a bit thin, and in my view, unconvincing. I did not find much in his book that resembled discourse analysis in any form that I would recognize. There was not a great deal of focus on language or language in use, for instance. Perhaps Hsiau is more focused on what James Paul Gee would call "Discourse" rather than "discourse" (here's a summary of that distinction). That is, Hsiau is more focused on "ways of being in the world" rather than on analysis of specific uses of language to communicate or persuade. Chu gives an example above of a more discourse-as-language-in-use form of discourse analysis that focuses on how writers use language and the contexts in which they are using language. While Hsiau's is an important book, I would like to have seen more of this kind of "discourse analysis" being used in it.

Notes on Xing Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Xing Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication. University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

I finished reading this last Friday, but it has been a busy week. As I mentioned before, there were a couple of negative reviews of this book. One the things that one of them complained about was Lu's use of her own personal experience, especially in the first chapter, "My Family Caught in the Cultural Revolution." Howard Goldblatt calls the first chapter "a nearly fatal distraction" and defends his arguably "churlish" response to Lu's reminiscences by arguing that

(1) [i]n the quarter century and more since the Cultural Revolution ended, with the death of Mao and the convenient indictment of the Gang of Four, dozens of memoirs (with "J'accuse" in evidence far more than "mea culpa") have appeared in English, along with numerous scholarly and journalistic works on the GPCR; one more may be of some psychological benefit to the author, but it essentially duplicates what others have already written, often with more power and evocative effect than the chapter of the book under review. (2) As I stated earlier, the inclusion of a personal memoir in a work of scholarship invests the entire project with an undesirable patchwork quality. (p. 170).

While it's true that there are already a lot of Cultural Revolution memoirs (many of which are cited by Lu), it's my feeling that Goldblatt is a bit off in his evaluation, largely due to what I'd say is a misunderstanding of the book's primary audience. Goldblatt characterizes Lu's audiences as "linguists interested in the study of rhetorical symbols and their impact on national citizenries, and those interested in China's modern history, such as scholars and 'China watchers'" (pp. 170-1), ignoring the obvious audience of rhetoricians, many of whom might be more focused on Western rhetorical traditions and practices and might not have read those "dozens of memoirs" that he mentions. Furthermore, different disciplines have different standards for the inclusion of personal experience in scholarship. While not all books in rhetorical studies include chapters on the author's related experiences, it's not unheard of, and it can sometimes be seen by scholars in the field as an important way of demonstrating the author's positionality in relation to their topic. In fact, a review of the book in Argumentation and Advocacy suggests that Lu's memories "give the book a human quality and make Lu's own feelings toward her subject clear" (p. 116), and a review in Rhetoric & Public Affairs argues that the "experiential context drives Lu's inquiry and indeed sets this work apart from (and above) other scholarly treatments of the period" (p. 506). 

I find myself more in agreement with one of the critiques by Michael Schoenhals: he argues that Lu's adoption of both the weak and strong forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the former being that language influences thought and the latter, that language determines thought) is not particularly helpfully used in explicating the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution. As Schoenhals suggests, Lu's book seems to ask readers simply to accept that the Chinese people of that period lost their ability to think for themselves because of the language used in political slogans, wall posters, revolutionary songs, etc. For instance, Lu argues that "the use of violent language leads to violent action" (p. 89). While I'm inclined to believe her (particularly in the aftermath of January 6, 2021), I feel as though Lu is counting on us to believe her rather than explaining to us how/why this could happen. Her example of the persecution and murder of Bian Zhongyun, a high school principal in Beijing, shows a correlation between the violent rhetoric and her torture and murder by the Red Guards (p. 89), but as the old saying goes, correlation ≠ causation. Did the violent language in the posters cause the Red Guards to torture and kill Bian? How do you prove that? I'm not sure what kind of evidence I would want to see, however. (And I'm not sure Schoenhals is, either.) Perhaps I should look at some of Lu's other sources, such as her citation of Hannah Arendt on "the banality of evil." It might be that bringing in some of the other theorists that she cites in her literature review, like Burke, McGee, or Wander, would better support her argument here. (She does this later in her discussion of political ritual, where she cites Rowland and Frank on "rhetorical violence [that] often leads to societal violence" [qtd in Lu, p. 146].) 

One interesting point about the idea that people lost their ability to think for themselves is that Lu also gives examples of people who were still able to think for themselves. For instance, one of her interviewees says, "I never knew what other people thought about the [political] rituals and bizarre things going on during the Cultural Revolution. I considered some of them problematic and foolish, but I never dared to say so. I couldn't speak my mind and I didn't trust what other people said, as I was afraid of being betrayed or persecuted" (qtd. in Lu, p. 150). This raises a question about whether most people had no "inner thoughts" or whether there were many people who were just afraid to express their inner thoughts. 

I also have to agree that at times, the book seemed more descriptive than analytical. For instance, there's a description of a "big character poster" (dazibao) at a barbershop:

The cornerstone of the Cultural Revolution was the shared political understanding that everything deemed proletarian was moral and ethical while everything deemed nonproletarian was evil and harmful. This formula could even be applied to a person's hairstyle. Hairstyles considered bourgeois or revisionist were regarded as harmful to society and strictly prohibited. Liang (1998) recounts the following example of a wall poster seen in front of a barbershop: '"Only heroes can quell tigers and leopards I wild bears never daunt the brave' [Mao's poem]. For the cause of the Cultural Revolution, this shop will not cut hair that parts from behind, or in the middle, or that is less than one inch short, as these hair styles are nonproletarian. The shop does not provide hair oil, gel, or cream. The shop does not provide hair blowing or temple shaving services for male comrades, nor perms or curling hair services for female comrades" (125). The practice of starting a poster with one of Mao's poem was a common feature of poster writing, employed both as a stylistic device and as a justification to legitimize the action. (p. 78)

I think this description of the wall poster could have been enhanced by an analysis of how the poem was being used. Why was that particular poem chosen to head the poster? How did it legitimize the actions of the barber? (And if there's no connection, that might also be interesting to discuss, since it might signal how randomly quotations from Mao were being used in the big character posters.)

Ben Krueger, author of the Argumentation and Advocacy review, notes a failure in Lu's comparative approach: "Her comparisons of the Cultural Revolution's rhetoric to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union seem particularly pedestrian" (p. 117). I have to agree with this, too. There are gestures toward comparison with other rhetorics, such as Lu's discussion of militaristic terms, where she notes that "Lakoff and Johnson (1980) discussed the use of war metaphors by U.S. presidents to distort realities and constitute a license for policy change" (p. 91), but the comparisons often don't go beyond this kind of quick reference. 

There were several places in the conclusion where she makes predictions that, from the perspective of 2023, I could only respond to in the margins with "Oh well..." In her last paragraph, Lu writes that "one thing is certain [about China's future]: the age of ideological totalitarianism is over" (p. 205). I see that there is now a new preface to the paperback edition, written in 2020, in which she expresses concern that younger Chinese will not learn about the Cultural Revolution and that "such rhetoric of polarization, dehumanization, and violence in the name of morality and justice will be evoked, escalated, and manipulated again in China or elsewhere in the world on a similar scale" (p. xii). She also notes the chilling language of Trump during the 2016 election, which she says reminded her of the Cultural Revolution.  

Despite all of these criticisms (or complaints), I did learn a lot from this book, and reading it also made me reflect on what was going on in Taiwan during the same time period. Some of the rhetorical features of the Cultural Revolution, such as the violent, ugly language, the attempts at brainwashing, and the use of political ritual, deification of the leader, etc., were similar in Taiwan during the martial law period. Like Mao, Chiang Kai-shek was called by such epithets as "the nation's savior, the helmsman of the era, the great man of the world" (民族的救星、時代的舵手、世界的偉人). And as I mentioned a couple of years ago in relation to Li Ang's story, "Auntie Tiger," there was a "feeling of fear and conspiracy in the air during that time." So was Taiwan's martial law period different from the Cultural Revolution in kind or just in degree? How might the rhetorics of these periods be compared?

Next up: A-Chin Hsiau's Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan, which might give me some insight on how Taiwan moved from Chinese Nationalism to Taiwanese Nationalism. 

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!

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 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.

Notes on Xiaoye You, Genre Networks and Empire

You, Xiaoye. Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China. Southern Illinois University Press, 2023. 

This book will be, I imagine, a challenging read for people in rhetorical studies (and even comparative rhetoric) who are not familiar with historical and literary (and rhetorical) scholarship on early imperial China. You focuses mostly on the Han dynasty, but also necessarily brings in the Qin and the pre-imperial kingdoms of the Zhou, Shang, and Xia. He's also discussing genres that scholars in rhetorical studies rarely address. In fact, as I mentioned recently and long ago, some comparative rhetoricians have advised against casting a broader net when identifying what counts as "rhetoric" in a particular setting. Fortunately, You seems to have ignored this advice. 

But saying that this book will be a challenging read doesn't mean it shouldn't be read. I found it full of interesting ideas about ancient Chinese conceptions of what people were doing when they engaged in debate or tried to persuade rulers toward particular courses of action--all political work, where the decision-making process involved imbricated genres and "multimodal" presentations that sometimes included music, food, and wine as modes of communication/persuasion. This suggests seeing rhetoric very broadly, including interpreting what is usually just seen as a "setting" or "context" for rhetoric as an active participant in the rhetorical process--part of the "genre networks" of You's title. He makes the point that studying genre networks provides insights into Chinese (and other) rhetorical practices that are not offered by studies of individual texts (p. 170).

The term 文體經緯, which he translates as "genre networks," indirectly comes from Liu Xie's (劉勰) Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (文心雕龍), although it's not clear that Liu used this term (I found both文體 and 經緯 here, but not together). You uses but doesn't dwell on Liu's discussion of genres; at times he criticizes it for its overly literary approach that tends to "deprive[] texts of much of their sociohistorical agency" (p. 145). Relatedly, he also suggests that Liu's conception of "genres" is too fixed on text types. You seems to prefer Sima Qian's (司馬遷) approach, which "emplaced discourses in unfolding events featuring genres as key actors mediating and shaping the events through genre networks" (p. 15). 

Although he criticizes Liu Xie for seeing genres as fixed text types, in some cases, You (helpfully) outlines and illustrates the patterns of some of the genres he’s discussing, such as the 詔 (zhao) edicts (p. 55) and answers to court exam questions (p. 64). These patterns, or moves, help to make the genres identifiable as text types, but at the same time, You shows how they are embedded in and vary with the sociopolitical situations where they're used. For instance, he describes the general form and tone of the commentaries submitted to the emperor, but then he points out how a particular text both conformed to and flouted the rules (or common understandings) regarding commentaries. The author, Gu Yong (You writes his name as 穀永, but I believe it's 谷永), follows the "rules" by couching his criticisms of the current ruler in "historical anecdotes and the Confucian classics" (p. 65), but he then "offers scathing criticisms" of the emperor with a "candidness [that] was almost unmatched among his peers" (p. 66). Then, like his peers, Gu concludes with a typified (indirect) plea: "I said what I am not supposed to say in my counsel, so I should be put to death ten thousand times" (p. 66)--in this case, however, Gu's use of this set phrase was much closer to the truth: You notes that Gu was demoted and barely avoided execution for his candidness (pp. 66-7).

He also examines the rhetorics of gender and the gendered rhetorics of the period, particularly in the Inner Court, which is where "the imperial consorts and their support staff" lived (p. 76). (For an interesting discussion of what becoming an imperial consort was like, see this article from the South China Morning Post--it's more focused on the Qing Dynasty, though, so not everything applies to earlier dynasties.) As You writes, men tried to control women in the Inner Court with a two-pronged approach: by "framing gender relations with the yin-yang theory" and by blaming women in the royal family for "natural anomalies, disasters, and social woes" (p. 75). Because court histories of the period were written by men, women's perspectives are underrepresented, but You is able to point out how elite women like Empress Dowagers Ma (馬皇太后) and Deng (登皇太后) used their literacy to rule the Inner Court and govern relations between the royal family and the state. He also shows how Ban Zhao (班昭) finished the Han Shu (漢書) after the death of her brother, Ban Gu (班固), and wrote Lessons for Women (女戒). You argues that although she seemed to conform "to elite men's expectations of women, Ban was subversive. She argued for women's education, took the instruction of women from the hands of men, and conceptualized a rhetorically savvy woman" (p. 93). 

The time period he has chosen to study also allows You to look into the early years of how Confucianism (the word is arguably anachronistic) was being used and taking shape in the court, along with other belief systems. The Han dynasty came after the Qin, which had been led by Qin Shihuang, famous for burning books and executing scholars, so Confucianism wasn't the rigid doctrine that many people (at least Westerners) imagine today. You points out, for instance, that while disputations and counsel often relied on the Four Books (along with other sources, including recently translated Buddhist texts), the literati used the texts to argue to make varying points. This led me to wonder if perhaps You’s observations about the malleability of the Confucian (and other) classics during debates and discussions in the Han court had to do with the fact that the meanings of the classics hadn’t been subjected to the kinds of commentary and interpretation that came later with, for instance, Zhu Xi’s (朱熹) commentaries that I understand became authoritative (or orthodoxy) in later centuries. (Wikipedia says that Zhu Xi’s commentaries were considered unorthodox in his time, but that later they became “the basis of civil service examinations up until 1905.”). I guess that would be something to explore (I'm sure it has been explored already).

You's conclusions about the limitations of decolonizing comparative rhetorics based on his study represent an attempt to show how his study speaks to current concerns in the field that I've been reading about as part of the seminar I attended a couple of weeks ago, so it's good to see another perspective on concepts like epistemic delinking. As You argues, it's important not to ignore the fact that decentering Western epistemologies by exploring "indigenous modes of representation" needs to take into consideration the possibility that "these ways may have been employed to establish ethnic, racial, gendered, colonial, and aesthetic hierarchies in a specific society or culture" (p. 172). Further, You argues,

a full epistemic delinking is not only impossible but also unproductive for actuating a more equal and just academic and social future. Complete delinking is impossible because of the interlocking nature of cultures, of rhetorical traditions, and of academic discourses, which developed historically by engaging and learning from one another. It is unproductive because an aggressive version of epistemic delinking could encourage nationalism, isolationism, racism, and xenophobia, as seen in the foreign policy debates in the Han dynasty, during the Cold War era, and now in the struggles of de-Westernization. (p. 172)

I think this is going to be a controversial conclusion (though I agree with it to an extent), and I wish You had said a bit more about it since it seems to be an important point. His book seems to me to be doing some delinking work by taking ancient Chinese thought systems and rhetorical practices largely on their terms, though at times he does make brief comparisons to Western thought and rhetoric, and his discussion of "genre networks" is clearly hybridizing Chinese and Western theories about genre. Is this perhaps a model for balancing epistemic delinking with some kind of engagement?

And on that I will end... for now...

Poem by Chen Li 陳黎: 〈蔥〉

I was at a Zoom panel discussion with Shawna Yang Ryan (author of Green Island) and two other speakers. One of them, Professor Sujane Wu from Smith College, mentioned this poem by Taiwanese poet Chen Li (陳黎):

I thought it was an interesting (and moving) piece of writing describing translingualism and the experience of growing up in Taiwan under Nationalist colonialism.

Chen has an English translation of the poem on his website.

Notes on Sue Hum, Arabella Lyon, "Recent Advances in Comparative Rhetoric"

Hum, Sue, and Arabella Lyon. “Recent Advances in Comparative Rhetoric,” The SAGE Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Sage, 2008, pp. 153-165.

I've read through some of the supplemental readings from the RSA Institute seminar that I attended the end of May, but I've decided not to write notes here on every one of them. I'm writing about this article, though, because it discusses some key ideas and concepts about comparative rhetoric and because it focuses on "Eastern and Chinese rhetoric" (154). 

Hum and Lyon start out by discussing how "rhetoric" should be defined. We know from the Lyon article that I previously discussed that she finds (found?) the use of the term "rhetoric" to be problematic, but that she is willing to use it as a "placeholder" (presumably until something better comes along?). As in "Tricky Words" (which was written after this article), here Hum and Lyon identify rhetoric with "political discourse." I had questions about that in response to Lyon's article, but here I would add the concern that such a definition might itself be too narrow, depending on what is meant by "political." Later on, though, they give what is perhaps a more specific (and at the same time, broader) idea of what they mean by "political" when they write, 

The work of comparative rhetoric ... is not simply transcendence of universals and affirmation of the prevailing "tradition" but also an attempt to define the cultural bases of discursive power and the ways it privileges some statements and strategies in the production of knowledge and reproduction of power (Foucault, 1972). (154)

This suggests that their concept of "political" is Foucauldian, concerned with what can be said and what cannot be said, with the discourses that produce knowledge and govern what can count as knowledge in a society. This is at least more general than the term "political discourse" might appear at first glance. 

Part of their argument for focusing on "political communication" seems to be pragmatic, however; as they put it, "Pretending that a discipline can study all of writing, speech, movement, music, image, and film diminishes its ability to engage with the other without 'stereotypes, cultural appropriations, exclusion, ignorance, irrelevance, rhetorical imperialism' ([Scott] Lyons, 2000, p. 462)" (154). Furthermore, they argue, broader definitions of rhetoric threaten to include "poetry, literature, and song to the diminishment of politics, the connection that makes rhetoric vital to the understanding of power" (154). 

One trap that this seems (to me) to fall into is an equation of genres (in a reductive sense of text types) with audiences and purposes, ignoring that the very notion of what "political discourse" is might vary depending on the culture. I'm currently reading Xiaoye You's Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China, and in that book, You points out how poetry, specifically the Book of Odes (詩經) was used in rhetorical education and when advising the emperor regarding policy decisions. This suggests that it's important not to have a definition of "political discourse" (if you want to use that as a definition of "rhetoric") that automatically excludes genres before considering their uses in different cultures. As Hum and Lyon themselves recognize, "prior understandings of what is rhetoric may focus us on the wrong aspects of Chinese culture and filter out what is significant" (155).

Hum and Lyon go on to describe four approaches to comparative rhetoric that they suggest represent how it is being done: 1) applying western rhetorical concepts and theories to non-Western texts (seemingly with a belief in the universality of western concepts); 2) bringing in western methods, but applying them more gingerly, acknowledging the limits of those perspectives; 3) working within the framework of the non-Western culture; and 4) using non-Western rhetorical concepts to analyze western texts (157-8). An important concern, they argue, is that comparatists recognize and confront their own positionality and avoid universalizing tendencies. Scholars must be aware of and acknowledge their own standpoints. 

Comparatists must also be aware of and recognize their ethical responsibilities, particularly if they are studying the rhetoric of another society. Here Hum and Lyon remind us of Linda Alcoff's advice regarding "speaking for others" (I mentioned this in an earlier post). In defense of speaking for others, they write, "A retreat from speaking for others supports the individualistic, autonomous ideology of the West and sets the desire to avoid criticism and error before the needs of dialogue" (160). Again, they stress the need for understanding one's own standpoint--one's "motive and assumptions" as an outsider--in relation to the other culture (161). "Revisionist or speculative readings without consideration of standpoint, accountability, and effect are less than scholarship," they write (161). That said, there needs to be dialogue between the standpoints of the cultures involved. 

In the conclusion, they describe a broader goal or purpose for comparative rhetoric, one that I want to quote at length because I think it might be useful for the course I'm trying to develop:

We compare rhetorics so that we may understand the limits of the term and our own conceptual frame for it. As we denationalize and denormalize our notions of rhetoric, we search for understanding of the power of communication in an era defined by new communication technologies, increased mobility, displacements of people, and cultural clashes. To that end, comparative rhetoric is a vital enterprise, but it can only be such if it offers more than a repeat of colonial tendencies. A comparative historical approach, focused on moments, texts, and political situations within cultures, would allow us to develop the "shared, interlocutionary dialogic modes of thought and language" that Swearingen (1991) proposes (p, 18). In looking at particular texts in particular moments, scholars show the interplay of diverse factions within a culture as well as across cultures. Openness to new definitions, methods, and understandings of ourselves and our cultures, critical awareness of the ethics of speaking, and dialogic engagement with other rhetorics will make rhetorical studies a more powerful speculative instrument in the 21st century. (162)

Here they're beginning to get at the notion of transnationality in comparative rhetoric that Bo Wang discusses in her call for a more geopolitical approach to the study of rhetorics.

Notes on C. Jan Swearingen, "Under Western Eyes"

Swearingen, C. Jan. “Under Western Eyes: A Comparison of Guigucian Rhetoric with the Pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle,” Guiguzi, China’s First Treatise on Rhetoric: A Critical Translation and Commentary, translated by Hui Wu, Southern Illinois UP, 2016, pp. 113-152.

Swearingen, in this wide-ranging chapter in Hui Wu's translation of Guiguzi (鬼谷子), focuses mainly on comparisons between pre-Socratic Greek philosophers/sages and their counterparts in early China, then moving on to comparisons of Socratic/Platonic and Aristotelian views of rhetoric and Guiguzi and other classical Chinese philosophers. Early on, she admits that this is a fraught exercise, risking the kind of colonialism that has recently been heavily criticized in comparative studies generally: "Some find the very idea of comparison fraught with Eurocentrism. Others object to a form of intellectual colonization that accompanies any attempt to bring the Other into a familiar line of vision" (122). But, she counters, "Comparison has long stood in a pairing with contrast; placing the two studies together activates a dialectic between sameness and difference that is compatible with both early Greek and early Chinese methods of discussion and of reasoning" (122). She worries that "the relentless race to establish alterity-based studies of difference, drawing upon models of colonialist hegemony, has brought with it another set of exclusions. Addressing this problem, recent studies have begun to adapt a both-and approach to comparative and contrastive rhetorical studies through developing methods of reading both ways, a double vision" (122). While admitting the dangers of applying Western theory and concepts to Chinese discourse (and discourse about discourse), she asks, "[W]hat if we begin turning the looking glass in the other direction, and ask the Chinese text, and Chinese reader, to see the parallels from within their culture and its lexicon" (143)? What if, perhaps she's asking, instead of comparing Chinese rhetoric to Greek rhetoric, we compare Greek rhetoric to Chinese rhetoric?

Much of this chapter bounces back and forth between ancient Greek and Chinese thinkers and (if it's safe to use the word) rhetoricians, highlighting similarities and differences in not only what they said and how they said it, but in their relations with their predecessors and their successors. She argues, for instance, that Aristotle was less of a "disciple" of Plato than Mencius was of Confucius (148). At the same time, she points out similarities between Aristotle's Rhetoric and Guiguzi in their emphases on audience, also suggesting that the focus on audience and "emotional" appeals in both texts led to criticism of their rhetorics (145). Ultimately, though, she suggests that their fates were quite different: 

Aristotle’s accounts of audience psychology are recognized in the West as among the earliest, and as forerunners to the study of psychology, which did not emerge until much later. Guiguzi’s focus on the prediction of audience reactions was one of the grounds for his dismissal from the Chinese classics. (144)

There's a lot going on in this chapter that I don't think I can adequately summarize, such as comparisons between how early Pre-Socratics and the Daoists viewed the world, "the One," "Being and Not Being," etc. I want to jump to the end, though, where Swearingen comes back to the challenging of translation, interpretation, and comparison of Chinese and Greek rhetorics/traditions. She quotes Stephen Owen, who points out that part of the challenge of comparing/translating from, for instance, Greek to Chinese comes from the fact that 

the precise force of the Greek words is in many cases a matter of great scholarly debate and ultimately inseparable from the history of the interpretation of these words in Latin and the vernaculars [as well as being inseparable from the transformations of those words as they were naturalized within the literary traditions of the vernaculars]. (149, bracketed comment is Swearingen's)

Based on this issue, Swearingen asks, "How could we ... engage in an exercise in multiple definitions: if it is not appropriate or clarifying to name 'rhetoric' as such in Chinese contexts, what should we call it? How might these alternate definitions begin to help us explore once again what we name when we call rhetoric 'rhetoric'" (150)? In the end, she suggests, "[i]t may be that the best way to teach and study rhetoric is to observe its practice, not to theorize its general contours, even though there are within Guiguzi’s representations many emerging names for kinds of speech, speakers, and interlocutors or audiences" (151). (And this is where I'm going to end, though she doesn't quite end there.)