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 Eve, 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.

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...

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

I don't have enough time to read the books I've got, but I bought two more recently. One has come already, and the other is supposed to come on Friday. The one I have now is Scott Simon's new book, Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa (University of Toronto Press, 2023). I haven't gotten into it yet beyond the preface, but I'm already thinking about moving it up on my list. 

Professor Simon also did a talk at the University of Washington a couple of months ago about the book. Here's a video of his talk:

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.)

Notes on Tarez Samra Graban, "Introduction"

Graban, Tarez Samra. “Introduction: Renewing Comparative Methodologies,” Global Rhetorical Traditions, edited by Hui Wu and Tarez Samra Graban, Parlor Press, 2023, pp. xvii–xxxviii. 

I'm running out of time on these notes, so I'm just going to copy down a few quotes from this introduction (and for the next, and last, article):

Whereas “stable” conceptualizations of language imply maintenance and preservation, “unstable” conceptualizations imply fluctuation and change based on the same circulatory factors that occur when dominant tongues become replaced by or subsumed within their modern variants. However, as the contributors to this volume aptly demonstrate, recovering rhetorical treatises in various languages does not necessarily mean tracing when and how a dominant language has given way to its variants, or establishing one language’s dominance over another. Rather, it means attending to the periods of textual mobility that allowed certain rhetorical practices to become vigorously and concurrently coopted or shared among diverse cultures and geographical spaces. (xvii-xviii, emphasis added)

The third need addressed by this collection is to develop analytic methodologies from rhetorical realignments and alternative frameworks for study6—frameworks that can be accessed by comparatists and non-comparatists alike. Our twenty-eight contributors examine rhetorical treatises to reveal intricate terminologies that may or may not bear resemblance to the so-called Western rhetorical tradition, disrupting the persistent dominance of a Pan-Hellenic core. (xviii) 

One note I had about this second quote is that I imagine that they first had to establish that what they were looking at were "rhetorical treatises"--that is, they would have to have in mind what a rhetorical treatise might look like in that other culture. I'd like to know more about how they made these decisions, since it would help me in both my development of a comparative rhetoric course and in my own research project.

An additional barrier to making comparative rhetorical work accessible for many non-comparatists may be found in the fine lines and thin boundaries (perhaps, even, in certain misconceptions) that occur between the monikers of comparative, cultural, postcolonial, and transnational when they are used to describe rhetorical study. What differentiates their agendas from one another? When are those agendas conflated or confused? (xxii)

I guess we'd add decolonial to that list? I think we also have to deal with the comment of Ellen Cushman that criticizes the use of terms such as "comparative" and "cultural" in reference to rhetorics. If we're to take that idea seriously, does that mean that the organizational scheme of this book is wrong-headed?

The linkage between comparative and transnational is prevalent when we realize that chapters dedicated to articulating more contemporary indigenous practices—such as East African and Polynesian rhetorics, for example—disrupt our assumptions about who or what needs representation at all. This linkage is productively blurred inasmuch as our contributors seek alternatives to the same Afro-Eurasian longue durée frame that has traditionally dominated post-, anti-, and decolonial scholarship. (xxii)

I just want to say that this would also be true for people who are studying modern rhetorics, such as modern Asian rhetorics.

[T]he scholarship represented in this collection does not necessarily reject or deny Western influences on rhetorical histories or on critical perspectives; rather, it considers “the West” in its globalized and circulating notions. However, it encourages reflection on how scholars might reinvent key terms, identify critical dilemmas, and express new desires by distinguishing between “comparative,” “cross-cultural,” “indigenous,” and “nomadic” approaches to rhetorical studies in the coming historical moment. (xxiii)

The principal methodology driving this book is in the concept of rhetorical regions, which encompass more than language or geography or politics alone. What we present here as “regional” distinctions between chapters draws attention to how various rhetorical practices are not bound to a single nation, country, language, or culture, even if the practices are stabilized by one or more of those constraints at a time. Instead, a region’s rhetoricity is demonstrated through its utility and deployment—through the conscious re/construction of how time, space, history, and memory all interact to form what we recognize as a functioning rhetorical tradition (e.g., “Arabic and Islamic,” “Chinese,” or “Mediterranean”). (xxiii)

I'm afraid I don't quite understand what is meant by "rhetorical regions." Maybe this is something we can talk about in the seminar?

[W]e ask how scholars can locate sources of culturally specific rhetorical traditions by avoiding the representational traps that often occur when comparative associations are driven by binary logic and by acknowledging that “border-crossings of all kinds are unfolding on an unprecedented scale.” (xxiv)

I draw on Jerry Won Lee’s “semioscape” as an operative concept for our own work—a phenomenon that describes the reinvention of nation-ness among globally mobile communities. ... [T]he idea of semioscapes guides our collection’s methodology in three ways. First, the semioscape is ... powerful testament to the many linguistic and cultural identifications that are exercised by ethnic groups when and wherever they settle, and it extends beyond, or cuts across, purely national or political lines. (xxiv)

Second, the semioscape implies movement, migration, and flow. (xxiv)

Finally, and most significantly for our project, the semioscape accounts for diasporic rhetorical traditions, highlighting that a rhetorical region is best recognized in the constellation of moments showing how its particular traditions have spread, rooted, and grown. (xxv)

[My question about "diasporic"--are there examples of diasporic traditions in this book, such as diasporic Chinese traditions?]

Notes on Ellen Cushman, "Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story"

Cushman, Ellen. “Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the Digital Archive.” College English, vol. 76, no. 2, 2013, pp. 115–35. 

Like Browne's article, "Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story" is based on work on a digital archive. (Cushman's article came out first, so maybe I should say Browne's article is like hers...) 

Cushman's focus is on how the decolonial digital archive can unsettle Western colonialist archival knowledge-making. Western archives and museums work by tearing things away from their original contexts and away from the people who use and interact (and tell stories) about them. They also put them in a Eurocentric kind of timeline (museums especially do this) to show the "evolution" of practices throughout a Eurocentric history that (not surprisingly) puts Western practices at the top. As Cushman puts it,

Western thinking creates its own singular tradition by pointing to itself along a timeline hatch-marked within and against a plurality of traditions. Installations at museums typically include plaques to indicate the name of the item, its date, and its origin (if known). Using dates, archives and museums train their visitors to be epistemologically obedient to Western modernity’s concept of tradition. (119)

She gives the example of wampum belts, which are used during stomp dances by the Cherokee elders. Archives and museums wanted some, but if they have them, the belts would be separated from their use and treated as artifacts of the past, like dead objects representative of some indigenous past. With the digital archive and the "Four Worlds curriculum" that Cushman was helping to construct, the wampum belt can still mediate knowledge as part of living traditions that can be conveyed to listeners using the Cherokee language (as spoken and as written in Sequoyan). 

Cushman goes on to give another example of a lesson on the Cherokee Songs and Stories DVD, an illustrated story that is narrated in spoken Cherokee, with Sequoyan subtitles. The story she tells about is a traditional story about the origins of the Milky Way. The illustrations help learners understand the story even if they don't know much of the language. She writes that this approach is especially helpful when working together with a polysynthetic language like Cherokee, which "build[s] pictures around the roots of verbs using prefixes and affixes to describe the action unfolding" (124). The stories in the digital archive "provide something like an immersive experience in the language that has been central to Native people’s language preservation efforts for the past two decades" (124). This can lead to the recovery of the language, which has been in decline due to older generations being forced to give up using it. Cushman argues that the use of Cherokee also has the epistemic function "of introducing Cherokee language learners to a decolonial understanding of how knowledge is made through story" (126).

After a discussion of how the roles of the elders and listeners are important in the storytelling, and how they try to emphasize this in the digital archive, Cushman contrasts this kind of digital archive and the western archive to show how this represents "history told in and on Cherokee terms": "Rather than the archive being experienced through codification of an expert’s understanding of the artifact  decontextualized from its actual use, the work of storytelling in this digital archive asks participants to actively take up the knowledge, to continue the telling of it, and to position themselves in relationship to the era, the place, and the elder telling the story" (129). While she admits that "it is not at all clear how well any archival holding of a story or digital story can recreate the situation of storytelling" (131), Cushman concludes that they "can make accessible the stories and practices of storytelling in ways that honor indigenous enunciations of knowledge and help learners persevere in their culture and language" (132). 

Notes on Kevin, Adonis Browne, "A Douen Epistemology"

Browne, Kevin Adonis. “A Douen Epistemology: Caribbean Memory and the Digital Archive.” College English, vol. 84, no. 1, 2021, pp. 33–57. 

This was a challenging read, and I'm not sure I can do justice to it. Browne is reflecting, at one level, on the Caribbean Memory Project, a digital archive of cultural history that he developed. But he is also reflecting on the role of memory in the making of pasts and futures for Caribbeanness. These two points intertwine when he speaks of the digital archive's "'projection of Caribbean memory'" as "a statement of rhetorical intentionality that takes as its major premise an idea of Caribbeanness that seeks to transcend temporal, spatial, situational, and technical boundaries" (38). He admits that the outcome of this project is "indeterminate," but at the same time, he sees the "indeterminacy" as "hold[ing] the greatest possibility for Caribbean activity projected from memory into the future" (39). 

Toward the end, he argues that "practitioners" of decolonization drop the language of "de-colonization" because, he says, 

[a]ny discourse that shares its etymological or epistemological roots with the discourse it means to undo is destined to reify the original and undermine itself--its legitimacy will always be circumscribed by the logics of the definitive context, rather than emerge out of the struggle to craft new (or revive old) language for what is currently being done, observed, shared, consumed, and studied, as the case may be. (55-6)

He goes on to say that we need to try to find language that fits "our unique purpose" (56), rather than simply react/respond to previous ideological discourses.  

There's a lot more going on in this article than I'm able to write about in a "summary." I realize, for example, that I haven't discussed Browne's use of the Douen, which he describes as a character from Caribbean folklore that is "the restless spirit of an unbaptized child" (40). I actually tried to write something about it, but I found myself getting more confused. I'll come back to this post after we've discussed the article in our group. My apologies for not doing it justice at this point.

Notes on Bo Wang, "Comparative Rhetoric, Postcolonial Studies, and Transnational Feminisms"

Wang, Bo. "Comparative Rhetoric, Postcolonial Studies, and Transnational Feminisms: A Geopolitical Approach." Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 3, 2013, pp. 226-242 DOI:10.1080/02773945.2013.792692

This is another potential article for my undergraduate comparative rhetoric class because, like Mao, Wang discusses an approach to comparative rhetoric and then applies it to an example. In this case, rather than applying her recommendations to one particular text, Wang looks at a whole body of work--the women's journals published in China in the early twentieth century. 

One of the issues that Wang starts out critiquing is the tendency to view non-Western rhetorics through a Western lens. She also mentions the problem of not having enough knowledge of the other culture. Later, she quotes Rey Chow, who points to the danger of Westerners having a lot of information at hand about their own cultures and not as much about the other cultures, which "enable[s] their studies [about their own cultures] to become ever more nuanced and refined," while their studies of other traditions amount to "a crude lumping together of other histories, cultures, and languages with scant regard to exactly the same kinds of details an internal dynamics of thought that, theoretically speaking, should be part of the study of any tradition" (qtd. in Wang 232). This results in a Western view that not surprisingly argues that the other cultures aren't as subtle or developed as the West is. This isn't just a problem of accessibility to information, I don't think; I think that Chow and Wang are suggesting a sort of "ignorant confidence" on the parts of those doing research with inadequate preparation. [It's something that I worry about in my own work, which is probably why I'm taking so long to work on my research...]

Wang calls for "a new and more contemporary engagement with transnational spaces, hybrid identities, and subjectivities grounded in differences related to gender, class, race, and culture" (228). Specifically, she points out that "most scholarship in comparative rhetoric still focuses on canonical texts by elite male authors" (230). [This had me worrying again about my own attention to "canonical" writers--(mostly) male writers who are already discussed a lot in fields such as comparative literature and other disciplines. As I mentioned in my notes on the book about Yang Kui, I felt like his wife, Ye Tao, who was by many accounts a powerful public speaker, kind of disappeared into the background. I feel like I should learn more about her, as well as about other women rhetors in Taiwan. (I have a book about Xie Xuehong 謝雪紅, for instance, that I have been meaning to read for a long time. Maybe I should add that to my list.)]

[The two women I mentioned in the previous paragraph are relatively canonical, however. Wang mentions Roberta Binkley's study that pointed out that women prophets were silenced; this made me think of the Dutch missionary Candidius' discussion of the women prophets or "priestesses" in Sinkan, Formosa. These priestesses, called Inibs, performed religious ceremonies that Candidius describes and seemed to have had the power 

to prophesy good or evil, whether it will be rain, or whether fine and beautiful weather may be expected. They judge concerning unclean places, and banish evil spirits or devils; for, as they say, many evil spirits or devils dwell amongst the people, and these spirits the Inibs banish with much noise and clamour. They also carry hatchets in their hands, and chase the devil till he jumps into the water and is drowned. (Campbell 25)

Of course, one of Candidius' tasks as a missionary was to silence the priestesses, which is accomplished, as his fellow missionary, Rev. Junius, reports:

The priestesses, who were so great an obstacle to our work, have now lost all power, and are treated with contempt, on account of the many falsehoods they formerly promulgated. They are not allowed to enter any houses except their own, and are thus prevented from practising their former idolatry. (Campbell 186)

It might be necessary to think about the roles of these priestesses and how they were silenced in the interests of the patriarchal religion that the missionaries were promulgating. And also to keep in mind who's doing the writing here--it's not the Sinkandians.]

Wang points to the importance of considering in comparative rhetoric "not only what but also how we are reading" (230). She warns about the risks of "reifying the cultural, social, and material conditions of the texts we examine and homogenizing the theories and practices of particular rhetorics" (230). 

Wang argues for taking a "geopolitical approach" that "links cultural specificities with larger geopolitical forces and networks" (233). She argues that such an approach, tied to a concern with "how we read rather than what we read," can "allow us to rethink history, identity, and the nature of theoretical investigation in our field and to write new narratives that complicate our understanding of non-Western rhetorical traditions" (233-4). [One question I have here, and that's informed by the example she gives at the end of the essay, concerns the contrast between how we read and what we read: it seems to me that her selection of the women's journals and their articles is stressing the what as much as the how--if we don't pay attention to what we read, wouldn't that just lead to more readings of canonical works? What am I missing here in her contrast between the two?]

Wang goes on to argue for "a shift away from the study of discrete national rhetorics" and a need to "focus on the negotiation and exchanges through which rhetorical genres, concepts, and strategies come into being: the economics of knowledge, social relations, power, and the symbolic actions that engender rhetoric" (235). [How do we shift away from "discrete national rhetorics?" I guess I'm wondering what a national rhetoric is, for that matter. When Wang examines the writing of early twentieth-century Chinese women, is that a discrete (national) group? Or is the fact that the women writers write about women's issues in other countries and bring in translingual references to A Doll's House (238) a sign that this is a more transnational rhetoric, not just the rhetoric of a discrete national group? She mentions "the strategic force of hybridity in forming nüquanzhuyi discourse" (238), so that might be shifting away from national rhetorics.]

She concludes that her study "shows the interconnectedness of rhetorical works and larger networks, and often texts must be reinterpreted within every-changing cultural, historical, and scholarly contexts" (239). I think that one of the values of this study, too, is that it's looking at a body of work rather than just one rhetorical performance. That, and this quote, reminds me of Jenny Edbauer's article on rhetorical ecologies--going beyond the idea of discrete rhetorical situations that are being responded to.

Notes on LuMing Mao's "Writing the Other into Histories of Rhetoric"

Mao, LuMing. “Writing the Other into Histories of Rhetoric: Theorizing the Art of Recontextualization.” Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, edited by Michelle Ballif, Southern Illinois UP, 2013, pp. 41–57.

This might be a good article to have students read in an undergraduate comparative rhetoric course. (Like the one I'm supposed to be planning right now!) It asks important methodological (and ethical) questions about representing the rhetoric(s) of "the other" (or "the others"). Then it introduces some concepts and practices that might be helpful in answering those methodological and ethical questions and presents an approach to "the art of recontextualization" for representing other rhetorics. And it ends with an example of Mao's own analysis of the rhetoric of the Daodejing. 

Mao begins with some questions that I thought should be highlighted in a comparative rhetoric class:

What right ... do scholars have to represent this or that particular culture and its rhetorics? From what vantage point do they position themselves, and how does their position in turn shape and influence the outcomes of their studies? Why do we often encounter, in the accounts of the other, the privileging of facts over experiences or of logic over other modes of thinking? (42)

The first question is one that I often ask myself. Unfortunately, I'm not sure I've come up with any satisfying answer. Mao cites Linda Alcoff's "much cited" article "The Problem of Speaking for Others" to provide a four-step strategy for thinking about your own relation to the "others" you are speaking for or about. Fortunately, she seems to reject the idea of simply giving up on speaking for others (an option that I have been tempted to take over these long years); she suggests the need to question your reasons for speaking, to think about your own status and position in relation to who you are representing, to accept accountability for what you say, and to consider the consequences of what you have said "on the discursive and material context" (Mao 45). 

In arguing for "interdependence and interconnectivity" as important principles for representing rhetorics, Mao uses Bakhtin's concept of answerability to posit that "each act of contextualization represents a response to preceding acts of contextualization and further anticipates a response from similar future acts" (46). (I have to admit that I asked in the margin if it was necessary to contextualize the use of Bakhtin here. That is, should we take the ideas of dialogism and answerability as universally applicable? I'm not asking this to be a smart-aleck...) 

Mao argues for the importance of examining one's own context and its influence on how they're representing others; in addition, the context of the "other" needs to be examined, and it should not be assumed that the "other" is unified or speaks with one voice. He argues for "cultivating a processual mode of representation--where we continuously trouble our own modes of thinking and learn to listen to the voice and claim of the other" (47). 

Mao tries to show how this art of recontextualization would work in looking at the rhetoric of the Daodejing. He contextualizes the classic by pointing to Daoism "as a direct challenge to Confucianism and Legalism of its time, but also because the Daoist sensibilities have permeated Chinese culture and its thought patterns" and have "unexpected affinities with postmodern views" (48-9). He shows how different terms/concepts in the Daodejing interconnect with each other in a "discursive field" to create a rhetoric that can "challenge and subvert Confucian ideology" and Legalism (54). He also points out the tension between people's individual "Daos" and "the social and political pressure to codify one of them as the Dao for everyone else to follow" (54). Mao argues that this latter pressure was "driven by the rhetorical exigencies of the time [during the Han dynasty] and spurred on by political ambition" (55). (Here I wonder if we have moved from the Daodejing notion of the Dao into the Dao of the Confucians? As Lloyd and Sivin say in The Way and the Word, "in the hands of Confucius and those who followed him it [Dao] took on normative meanings" [200].)  

Mao ends by seeing how this discussion of the Dao might be applied to our current situation, focusing on the rise of "cultural nationalism" in China, in which (as he puts it), there is pressure for only one Dao ("read as the state ideology or the law of the land"), and Chinese citizens' more individual Daos are suppressed. 

One final question I have is in regards to the "processual mode of representation" that Mao raises earlier--I'm not sure I see that in this example. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place, or I'm not sure what to look for. What should this "processual mode" look like? Should we be bringing ourselves into the text and reflection on our own positions in relation to the texts or rhetorics that we are studying? 

Notes on María Lugones, "Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception”

Lugones, María. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia, vol. 2, no. 2, 1987, pp. 3-19

Lugones writes about the importance of being able to "travel" to other people's "worlds" and to see "what it is to be them and what is is to be ourselves in their eyes" (17). She suggests that this travel "is not the same as becoming intimate" with someone else because "[i]ntimacy is constituted in part by a very deep knowledge of the other self and 'world' travelling is only part of having this knowledge" (17). 

I take this to be about empathy, although that word doesn't ever show up in her article. Maybe Lugones would disagree and say that it's different from empathy. I'm not sure. I've read critiques of empathy that argue that it is a projection of oneself into someone else, so that you're not really feeling what they feel but feeling what you think they feel. It's almost as though you're colonizing someone else's mind and experiences. Lugones' comment about intimacy involving "a very deep knowledge" of another person might lead to the idea that empathy, which doesn't really seem to require a deep knowledge of others, relies on a person's guesses about the other or a kind of speculation ("how would I feel if I were in that situation?") that some scholars have argued results in people feeling empathy more for members of their in-group than members of their out-group. (An interview with a psychologist named Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy, suggests this.) So I wonder what Lugones would say about whether this "world"-travel relates to empathy.

She also writes, relatedly, about her feeling that people on the outside of the mainstream (such as herself, who is a woman of color in the United States) have "necessarily acquired flexibility in shifting from the mainstream construction of life where [they are] constructed as an outsider to other constructions of life where [they are] more or less 'at home'" (3). She sees a value in that (although she says a lot of times it's done unwillingly) because she sees it as connected to traveling to others' "worlds" and to "cross-cultural and cross-racial loving" (3-4). 

She also critiques westerners' "agonistic sense of play" for its emphasis on winning and connects it to problems with "[a]gonistic travellers [who] fail consistently in their attempt to travel because what they do is try to conquer the other 'world'" (16). People who want to cross "racial and ethnic boundaries" need to give up agonistic attitudes in order to travel across "worlds" (16). 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes on Cushman, et al. "Decolonizing Projects"

Ellen Cushman, et al. "Decolonizing Projects: Creating Pluriversal Possibilities in Rhetoric, Rhetoric Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2019, 1-22. DOI: 10.1080/07350198.2019.1549402

I read these essays before, so I'm going to copy my notes from then here. (Partly because I need to make sure I read the articles I haven't read before! Also because my battery is almost dead!)

From Cushman's Introduction: 

"This, our subsequent polyvocal symposium, heeds Ellen Cushman’s assertion that translingual education functions as a site for 'decolonizing knowledge' that can potentially 'level linguistic and knowledge hierarchies that always indicate imperialist legacies of thought and deed' ('Translingual' 234-35)." (p. 1) (I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "indicate" here. Point to? Index?)

"We also agree with Christie Toth who asserts that attending to concerns of settler colonial logics can 'inform understandings of the relationships between rhetoric, writing, and structures of oppression in the United States, whether or not one’s work focuses primarily on Native American issues' (497, emphasis added). In short, a decolonial approach extends far beyond Indigenous rhetorical concerns." (p. 1) (This had me wondering if this was then only applicable to the United States. I note that at least one of the essays later on is about a country other than the U.S.)

"Additionally, pluriversal possibilities must overtly resist producing sites of 'alternative' rhetoric. Categorizing 'other/ed' rhetorics as such illustrates allegiance to the notion that a totalized reality of rhetoric already exists; therefore, alternatives to that reality are the only option for making rhetoric more representative and responsive to the lived realities of all people. At worst, each alternative rhetoric risks replicating the very same epistemological hierarchies and boundaries of exclusion created by the imperial difference of Western rhetoric." (p. 2). (There's a footnote after "alternative rhetoric" that gives examples of "alternative" rhetorics, like "cultural rhetoric, African American rhetoric, Indigenous rhetoric, Chicana/o rhetoric, feminist rhetoric, comparative rhetoric, visual rhetoric, embodied rhetoric, and/or insert-your-adjective-here rhetoric" (p. 4). I have to admit that I found this list a bit dismissive of a lot of research that might use these terms--like "comparative rhetoric"! Should we not be using these terms at all, then?)

"From there, decolonial scholars move on to reveal connections and shared goals across these differences to offer alternatives to modernity, as opposed to alternative modernities (Mignolo, Darker xxviii). In the end, decolonizing rhetorics offer options, rather than alternatives, and does so in an effort to pluriversalize rhetorics without universalizing or authenticating another alternative approach to rhetoric." (p. 2). [I'm not sure of the difference between "options" and "alternatives." I also note that the sentence before that mentions "offer[ing] alternatives to modernity, as opposed to alternative modernities." To follow that formulation, should we be talking about "alternatives to rhetoric" as opposed to "alternative rhetorics"? (Not sure that works.) Is there a sense that "alternative" suggests something totalizing?]

Names "two key decolonial actions": "(1) actively delinking (that is, identifying and eschewing an expectation, an assumption, or another extant 'link' that reflects colonial legacies of power) and (2) transing (as a stance of openness that responds explicitly to Rachel Jackson’s call to attend to rhetoric’s transrhetorical quality of moving 'across multiple location categories—historical, spatial, temporal, cultural, local, regional, national, and global, as well as across differences') (305)." (p. 3)

From Rachel Jackson's essay:

"Even as the instructor of record, asking naïve and assuming questions as an outsider was not the appropriate way to gain knowledge. I had to listen closely to show respect and earn trust. I had to observe the rhetorical behavior of the Kiowa elders and students around me. I stayed quiet and served in any way I could because this is what I saw them doing and I was following their model rather than setting one. Meanwhile, I grew new eyes and ears. I learned a new language, culture, and way of communicating that respected the community space I inhabited as an outsider representing a western institution of higher learning." (p. 4) [Listening and following rather than questioning.]

"Stories enact cultural continuance in each telling, particularly to Kiowa audiences learning their meaning for the first time, as was the case for many of our students that night in class. Transrhetorically, these stories communicate new meanings across time in relation to the historical context within which they are told and the expanding audiences (such as the readers of this article) with whom they are shared. These stories inevitably convey more than the story itself; they transmit cultural values, practices, and history. They express and perpetuate Native epistemologies within the surround of colonial suppression to transmit Indigenous cultural knowledges and perspectives, even if against the odds." (p. 6)

From Annie Laurie Nichols' essay:

"It becomes vital, then, to consider not only why we listen, but how we do so. As as ethnographer, I have been trained to be as blank and passive as possible while listening. But one’s self is, in the moment of listening, in relationship with the speaker and influencing their speech. It matters that I’m a white American girl who is disarmingly friendly, speaks Russian, and shows up in rural villages in Azerbaijan in the middle of winter. It also matters that I academically profit from the conversations I have there. Who I am influences what I am told, what I hear, and how I relate to the speaker." (p. 8)

"First, the ethnographer must acknowledge their own subject position and participation in the relationship and creation of meaning. Instead of reinscribing power imbalances in my fieldnotes, I should listen as a co-creator. This means setting aside my judgments, engaging with my interlocutor as someone to learn from, and giving them my full attention. Instead of being as passive as possible, I should be as present as possible." (p. 8) [Does this contradict Jackson, or is it that they are engaged in different kinds of activities? (Nichols as ethnographer vs. Jackson as instructor?)]

"Second, the listener must delink their assumptions about who the speaker should be—who the hearer expects or wants them to be—and listen to who they are—who they constitute themselves as in that moment (Mignolo “Delinking”). Ethnographic listening is a practice of delinking because we listen not just for rhetorical devices or for meaning-making, but also for the constitution of relationships (Tompkins). If we delink our assumptions about health and listen ethnographically, we can hear how my informant is highlighting what is important to him. I asked about food, and he told me about relationships." (p. 8)

"Practically, this meant not pressing with follow-up questions, respecting the legitimacy of his answers, and continuing the conversation organically, not treating my research goals as more important than what my interlocutor wanted to share and the relationship and meanings we were building together." (p. 8) [This sounds more similar to what Jackson is suggesting.]

From Rivard's essay:

"Both of these requests represent the tribes’ position in what Quijano calls the 'colonial matrix of power' or the spheres of colonial influence and dominance left behind after formal colonial rule ended (qtd. in Mignolo, 'Delinking' 476). Tribal subjectivity and epistemology was/is being erased by the very need to have me, a non-Native academic, write about their existence and gain access to archives whose ontological framework supports the legal rhetoric of evidentiary standards." (p. 10) [Even helping is implicated in the colonial matrix of power and in delegitimizing tribal subjectivity and epistemology.]

"This erasure occurs in a number of ways including classifying history into eras that center the progress of the nation-state, clumping all Indigenous communities into a single category of 'Native American' or 'Indian,' failing to use individual tribal names, or organizing material under subject headings based on a single government or colonial leader." (p. 10) [This reminds me of the LOC and Dewey systems and how they organize knowledge from a Western perspective.]

"I also aim to de-link the concepts of archives and evidence. Such delinking work is necessary in order to make way for what Duarte and Belarde-Lewis describe as 'imagining,' which consists 'of creating figurative and literal spaces for the work of building, analyzing, and experimenting with Indigenous knowledge organization' (687)." (p. 11)

From Moulder's essay:

"Critically imagining the diplomats’ story—their worldviews, the pains they took to make themselves heard, their shared experiences of broken treaties that led them into alliance, the linguistic barriers they communicated across while travelling long distances—brings into sharp relief the anti-democratic efforts to silence them and shows how the emerging democratic government compounded their struggles to maintain the sovereignty of their nations." (p. 13) [This had me wondering how you "critically imagine" the Indigenous diplomats' side of the story...]

From Murdock's essay:

"[T]ransrhetorical methodology moves. It moves across times and spaces, and across modes and materials. Transrhetorical consideration of meaning-making not only emphasizes place-based manifestations of meaning and the rhetorical work that occurs across spaces, but also the motion and action of that work in materials." (p. 15)

From Grant's essay:

"The idea here is less on identities or that individuals act within given contextual containers. Rather, relations constitute individuals and the means available to them. As the women confront each other in this scene, not only does place speak through them, but wider ecologies of relations generate rhetorical situations, exigencies, and availabilities. To understand communicative activity in this way widens our scope to look at how individuals and things are taken up by relations rather than given representations of something else." (p. 17)

From Adams' essay:

"Here I pair two theories of imagining. Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch’s notion of critical imagination offers 'a tool' for 'hypothesizing, in what might be called "educated guessing," as a means for searching methodically, not so much for immutable truth but instead for what is likely or possible, given the facts in hand' (71). Critical imagining as a feminist rhetorical practice can be usefully extended with Emma Pérez’s theory of the 'decolonial imaginary,' which she employs as a 'rupturing' and 'interstitial space' where 'differential politics and social dilemmas are negotiated' and where scholars can work toward 'alternative[s] to that which is written history' (6)." (p. 19) [I wonder if this can be connected to what Moulder has to say.]

Notes on Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a Concept"

Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. “Americanity as a Concept, Or the Americas in the Modern World-System.” International Social Science Journal, 1992, pp. 549-556.

This article contrasts the development of North America and Latin America in the capitalist world-system. It begins by arguing (similar to Mignolo) that "[t]he Americas were not incorporated into an already existing capitalist world-economy. There could not have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas" (549). 

They argue that the newness of the "New World" was "four-fold, each linked to the other: coloniality, ethnicity, racism, and the concept of newness itself" (550). They go on to describe coloniality as "an essential element in the integration of the interstate system, creating not only rank order but sets of rules for the interactions of states with each other" (550). Even if a state was able to move up in the rankings, it actually solidified the idea of the hierarchy, even when some colonies fought for independence. "Independence did not undo coloniality; it merely transformed its outer form" (550).

They also argue that the ethnicities that are how people are divided in the Americas today "did not exist prior to the modern world-system. They are part of what make[s] up Americanity" (550). They go on to show how ethnicity was "the inevitable cultural consequence of coloniality" because it allowed the delineation of "social boundaries corresponding to the division of labour" (550). 

They call racism, "theorized and explicit, ... a creation largely of the nineteenth century, ... a means of shoring up culturally an economic hierarchy some of whose political guarantees were weakening in the post-1789 era of 'popular sovereignty" (551). They argue that the US was more explicit about its racism than Latin America, although racism has become more subtle recently (remember that this was written in 1992; I'm not entirely sure that racism was particularly subtle at that time--at least not for Rodney King, the victims of the MOVE bombing, etc.--it's certainly not subtle nowadays). They tie the "subtler" form of racism to meritocracy, which "justifies racist attitudes without the need to verbalize them" (551). 

Finally, "newness" itself--valuing newness over appeals to tradition or privilege--was a product and productive of the "New World" and modernity: "Modernity became the justification of economic success, but also its proof. It was a perfectly circular argument, which diverted attention from the development of underdevelopment" (552). 

They go on to contrast North and Latin America through the ways that coloniality was practiced and what it meant--the differences between the way it was practiced in the Iberian colonies vs. the British colonies. I'm not going to get too much into this at this point, though.