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. 

Notes on Walter D. Mignolo, "Delinking"

Mignolo, Walter D. “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, Mar. 2007, pp. 449–514.

This was a long and difficult read (exacerbated by a particularly high pollen count yesterday that made it hard for me to focus!). I'm not sure I can do this article justice in a summary, but the main thing that I came away from it with was the idea that the Western European experience of modernity (in both its historical and its epistemic forms) should not be taken as a universal experience through which other places should understand their own experiences. Part (a main part) of the reason for that is probably how the whole development of modernity grew out of colonialism (which involved the "discovery" and occupation of the "New World" and the slavery and genocide that was part of that colonialism). This is certainly not a compete summary or synopsis of the article, but it was the "center of gravity" of the article, as I take it.

A few lot of quotes from the article that I found useful and/or confusing:

"Modern rationality is an engulfing and at the same time defensive and exclusionary. It is not the case, Quijano added, that in non-European imperial languages and epistemologies (Mandarin, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Aymara, etc.), the notion of Totality doesn’t exist or is unthinkable. But it is the case that, particularly since the 1500s and the growing dominance of Western epistemology (from Theo-logy to secular Ego-logy (e.g., Descartes, ‘I think, therefore I am’), non-Western concepts of Totality had to be confronted with a growing imperial concept of Totality." (p. 451)

"I am observing that from 1500 on, Ottomans, Incas, Russians, Chinese, etc., moved toward and inverted ‘recognition’: they had to ‘recognize’ that Western languages and categories of thoughts, and therefore, political philosophy and political economy, were marching an expanding without ‘recognizing’ them as equal players in the game." (p. 451)

"De-coloniality starts from other sources. From the de-colonial shift already implicit in Nueva corónica and buen gobierno by Waman Puma de Ayala; in the de-colonial critique and activism of Mahatma Gandhi; in the fracture of Marxism in its encounter with colonial legacies in the Andes, articulated by José Carlos Mariátegui; in the radical political and epistemological shifts enacted by Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Rigoberta Menchú, Gloria Anzaldúa, among others. The de-colonial shift, in other words, is a project of de-linking while post-colonial criticism and theory is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy." (p. 452)

"‘New inter-cultural communication’ should be interpreted as new inter-epistemic communication (as we will see bellow, is the case of the concept of inter-culturality among Indigenous intellectuals in Ecuador). Furthermore, de-linking presupposes to move toward a geo- and body politics of knowledge that on the one hand denounces the pretended universality of a particular ethnicity (body politics), located in a specific part of the planet (geo-politics), that is, Europe where capitalism accumulated as a consequence of colonialism. De-linking then shall be understood as a de-colonial epistemic shift leading to other-universality, that is, to pluri-versality as a universal project." (p. 453)

"To de-link from the colonial matrix of power and the logic of coloniality embedded in la pensee [sic?] unique, it is necessary to engage in border epistemology and in alternatives TO modernity or in a the global and diverse project of transmodernity." (p. 456)

"Emancipation and liberation are indeed two sides of the same coin, the coin of modernity/coloniality." (p. 457)

"the geo-politics of knowledge names the historical location (space and time, the historical marks and configuration of a space and a place, etc.) and authority of loci of enunciations that had been negated by the dominance and hegemony of both the theo-logical and ego-logical politics of knowledge and understanding." (p. 460) (I think I understand this...)

In relation to Guaman (Waman) Poma (Puma)'s Nueva Corónica: "The missionary arguments w[e]re simple: these people do not have alphabetic writing, therefore they cannot have history because for a Renaissance man of the sixteenth century, history was irretrievably linked to alphabetic writing in the Greco-Latin tradition (not Hebrew or Arabic or even Cirylic [sic], of course)." (461) (My comment: Candidius thought this about the Sirayans he was working with/on, too. In fact, he made the same argument in relation to the idea that they could be easily converted to Christianity because their lack of a writing system meant that their knowledge of their religion was hard to be carried on from generation to generation.)

"In other words, de-linking could hardly be thought out from a Marxist perspective, because Marxism offers a different content but not a different logic. The epistemic locations for de-linking comes from the emergence of the geo- and body-politics of knowledge), of which Waman Puma shall become the reference point of all subsequent projects." (p. 462)

"The rhetoric of modernity works through the imposition of ‘salvation’, whether as Christianity, civilization, modernization and development after WWII or market democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union." (p. 463)

"One may wonder, for instance, what people in the Islamic world or in China or India thought about racial classification in the West as it was being elaborated since the sixteenth century. Most likely, they were not aware that they were being classified and what consequential role they would have in the order of thing that was being articulated in Western structures, principles and institutions of knowledge. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the entire globe is responding in one way or another to Western racial classification." (p. 480) (He cites Amy Chua, of all people, on this! "The interesting anecdote of Bolivian candidate to Miss Universe, from Santa Cruz (El Nacional, The Economist), is revealing of the fact that the racism and the colonial matrix of power persist in Bolivia after 500 years, now integrated to new for of racial violence generated by market economy (Amy Chua 2003)" (p. 509, n. 66). I'm not sure what that "interesting anecdote" is, though...)

"In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to deal with the colonial problem." (p. 488) (I sort of get this...? I only wonder how far this argument can be taken...)

"Anzaldúa’s clear-cut, ‘they are not helping us but following our lead’, is the basic claim that established the foundation of the geo-politics (e.g., Third World perspective) and the body-politics (e.g., post-civil rights consciousness in USA: women and men of color, gay and lesbians) from where an identity based on politics (and not a politics based on identity) emerged." (p. 492) (I think here he's saying that what people criticize as "identity politics" should be seen as an "identity based on politics"?)

"Border thinking is grounded not in Greek thinkers but in the colonial wounds and imperial subordination and, as such, it should become the connector between the diversity of subaltern histories (colonial and imperial  like Russia and the Ottoman empires) and corresponding subjectivities." (p. 493)

"We are not, of course, looking to retrieve an authentic knowledge from Chinese, Arabic or Aymara; but, rather, we want to include the perspective and in the foundation of knowledge subjectivities that have been subjected in and by the colonial matrix of power. The diversity of actual manifestations and practices of border thinking make up what I have described as an-other paradigm." (p. 493) (Note sure I get this point.)

"There is, of course, nothing wrong in the fact that a given group of people put forward its own cosmovision. The problem arises when a limited number of people feel they are appointed by God to bring (their) good to the rest of the humanity. That is, as Quijano puts it, ‘the provincial pretense to universality’." (p. 493)

"Western expansion includes the good, the bad and the ugly, although the ‘good’ in its various forms, it is a consequence of the bad and the ugly, as we are witnessing today in Iraq: first you destroy a country, then you provide help and promote reconstruction, third you promote freedom and democracy, and four you crash Islamic thinkers who would like to reconstruct Iraq and write the constitution on the basis of sharia and the Q’uran and not on the bases of the democracy and the Bible." (p. 496)

"Then, am I proposing a sort of ‘cultural relativism’ with its rhetoric of ‘let me alone in my place’? Well, not exactly." (p. 497)

"Still, the universalization of the regional is one consequence of Western imperial/colonial expansion. As a result, each local history of the planet, today, has to deal with the modern/colonial world, the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality. Each local history has its own language, memory, ethics, political theory, and political economy (as we have been witnessing daily in Iraq since March 2003 when the ‘mission accomplished’ statement was proffered in Washington), all of which are also marked by traces of the local in the relations of domination and exploitation within Western knowledge. The ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectations’ are di-verse, or rather, pluri-verse  what each diverse local history has in common with others is the fact that they all have to deal with the unavoidable presence of the modern/ colonial world and its power differentials, which start with racial classification and end up ranking the planet (e.g., First, Second and Third World was a racialization of politics, economy, cultures and knowledge). Thus, the pluri-versality of each local history and its narrative of decolonization can connect through that common experience and use it as the basis for a new common logic of knowing: border thinking." (p. 497)

"Decolonizing knowledge and being from the perspective of Japan’s or Russian’s colonies will be quite different from the perspective of England’s colonies. In the first two cases, decolonization from the epistemic and existential conditions imposed by Japanese and Russian languages leaves still another layer to deal with, which is the epistemic and epistemic conditions growingly imposed world wide by Greco-Latin and the six vernacular imperial languages of Western empires. That is, Japanese and Russian languages and categories of thought became subordinated to the hegemony of Western epistemology and its imperial and global reach." (p. 498) (Not entirely sure I understand this, although I think I get the general idea.)

"Thus, border thinking becomes the necessary critical method for the political and ethical project of filling in the gaps and revealing the imperial complicity between the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality." (p. 499)

---

OK, that's enough for now. I need to get on to another article now.

Notes on Eric Hayot, “Vanishing Horizons"

Hayot, Eric. “Vanishing Horizons: Problems in the Comparison of China and the West.” A Companion to Comparative Literature, edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, John Wiley and Sons, 2011, pp. 88-107.

Hayot gives a different perspective on comparability or incommensurability from those of Lloyd and Ames. While Lloyd argues for the importance of paying attention to the contexts of debates/arguments in different cultures and the questions the interlocutors were trying to answer, and Ames argues that the modes of argumentation differ between ancient China and classical Greece (along with the assumptions, as Lloyd also suggests), Hayot focuses on the contexts for comparison of China and the West. 

Like Escobar and Dussel, Hayot focuses (first) on modernity--the European Enlightenment and colonial expansion--as the driving force for making comparisons. Like Lyon, Hayot argues that the process of making comparisons entails "a theory of comparison, of comparability, that is an act of philosophy and an act of practice" (88). The Jesuits who went to China, he writes, tried to argue that the Chinese (as Confucians) were "theological and philosophical cousins to the Catholic tradition" (92), and so they tried to show how Confucian beliefs and language presaged Christianity. After the Rites Controversy and subsequent banning of Christian missions from China by the Kangxi emperor, the next major context for comparisons between the West and China took the form of "the secular universals appropriate to the renewed disciplines of the European Enlightenment" (93). This secular universalism put non-Western cultures in a historical relation with the "modern" West (as Dussel also suggests), where the cultures that the Europeans encountered (and usually colonized) were cast as "pre-modern." 

China's loss in the two Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century confirmed for the West (and for many Chinese) that it needed to modernize. But the tiyong 體用 formulation of Zhang Zhidong became emblematic for how China would use Western learning (for "use") "effectively ceded the ground of the practical or the functional to modernity and its cultural others, while retaining for China a set of values that could subtend those practices and functions" (96). Hayot argues that this approach left the "non-Western or non-modern" with "something of the status of an aesthetic object" (96), since all practicality (science, etc.) was left to the modern West. From the western perspective, argues Hayot, 

the truly East Asian is therefore relegated to the realm of the pre-modern, and thus the realm of culture (including science and medicine) that developed prior to the East Asian encounter with Europe from the seventeenth century onward. Beyond the temporal and comparative boundary established by that encounter, "contamination" with the West renders suspect the nature or quality of East Asian authenticity, and reifies it as much as possible in the realm of culture--though reifying in this way is, as I have suggested, a very modern thing to do. (96-7)

[Rey Chow made a similar point about Chinese Studies as a discipline back in 1998: "Within the field of Chinese studies, ... the dead and the living are separated by what amounts to an entangled class and race boundary: High culture, that which is presumed to be ethnically pure, belongs with the inscrutable dead; low culture, that which is left over from the contaminating contacts with the foreign, belongs with those who happen to be alive and who can still, unfortunately, speak and write" (17). Her argument goes beyond what Hayot is saying here about modernist perspectives on East Asia by bringing in another boundary between "high" and "low" culture.]

Hayot moves on to discuss "the metaphor problem," where it has been posited that one feature of Chinese poetry is the absence of metaphors (see what I did there?). By lack of metaphor, Hayot writes, "When Chinese poetry compares, Yu argued, the comparisons it makes do not create new 'worlds' of meaning, or establish quasi-metaphysical equivalences between the known and the unknown" (97). He cites Yu, Stephen Owen,  James J. Y. Liu, and Francois Jullien, who seem to see the lack of metaphor in Chinese poetry as "a positive feature of the Chinese aesthetic" (98). But as he says, citing Zhang Longxi, this "affirm[ation of] the two-worlds thesis of East/West comparison" suggests that the language of figures cannot be translated (98), just as some in rhetoric suggest that Chinese rhetorical terminology cannot or should not be translated. [Here Hayot seems to be arguing against something akin to what Ames and Lloyd are cautioning us about.]

Hayot's final section involves "the authenticity problem," which brings back modernity to some extent. The "authenticity problem" seems to come up partly in response to the postcolonial critiques that came after Said's Orientalism, and it concerns some of the modern Western authors' use of China or Chinese material as, it is argued, a metaphor or a figure rather than as a real reference. This is something that, Hayot argues, the West seems to be able to get away with (for example, with Pound or Brecht). Chinese writers, on the other hand, are not given the same freedom to use Western material figuratively. Here Hayot gives an example that I'm not sure works, when he argues that "Chinese figurations of the West end up looking like failures of imitation or failures of understanding – like, that is, intellectual and circumstantial failures rather than ontological ones" (102). His example is from a criticism by Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang of Taiwanese modernists whose writing, she says, was more imitative and lacked "the essential modernist spirit of experimentation and innovation" (qtd. in Hayot 102). I'm not sure I understand the connection between Chang's critique of the Taiwanese modernists' use of modernist stylistic devices (she's speaking specifically of their adaptation of stream-of-consciousness) rather than references to the West. So I'm not entirely sure that the contrasting examples of "the authenticity problem" are comparable. 

Finally, I'd cite Hayot's quotation of something Rey Chow wrote in 1993 that Hayot feels (in 2011) hasn't been considered enough outside of comparative literature: "How, in spite of and perhaps because of the fact that [East Asia] remained 'territorially independent,' it offers even better illustrations of how imperialism works--i.e., how imperialism as ideological domination succeeds best without physical coercion, without actually capturing the body and the land" (qtd in Hayot 103). There's been a lot of discussion about the US as an imperialist power and English as a form of linguistic imperialism. I think Xiaoye You's book, Writing in the Devil's Tongue, is one book outside of comparative literature that makes the point that at different points in modern Chinese history, Western imperialism was ideologically and linguistically dominant. [By the way, Hayot's insertion of "East Asia" doesn't seem to be considering that Taiwan and Korea were both colonized by Japan (along with Manchukuo, for that matter).]

OK--I'm sure I've left a lot out of this, but I need to get some sleep. And I think I'm actually falling behind in the readings, but I will probably take the weekend off. As usual, I'd appreciate any comments or questions about my notes!

Notes on Enrique Dussel, "Eurocentrism and Modernity"

Dussel, Enrique. “Eurocentrism and Modernity.” boundary, vol. 20, no. 3, 1993, pp. 65-76. 

Escobar cites Dussel's work a lot in the article we read, most memorably when Dussel describes "Hegel's writing [as] tak[ing] on something of the sonority of Wagner's trumpets" (71). Dussel states his basic argument in the second sentence of this lecture: 

In these lectures, I will argue that modernity is, in fact, a European phenomenon, but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content. Modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the "center" of a World History that it inaugurates; the "periphery" that surrounds this center is consequently part of its self-definition. The occlusion of this periphery (and of the role of Spain and Portugal in the formation of the modern world system from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries) leads the major contemporary thinkers of the "center" into a Eurocentric fallacy in their understanding of modernity. If their understanding of the genealogy of modernity is thus partial and provincial, their attempts at a critique or defense of it are likewise unilateral and, in part, false. (65)

As others (Quijano, I believe) have mentioned, Dussel establishes 1492 as the "date of the 'birth' of modernity" (66), since European modernity had to have a non-European other to compare itself with in order to "constitute itself as a unified ego exploring, conquering, colonizing an alterity that gave back its image of itself" (66).  Most of the rest of this lecture is Dussel's uncovering the Eurocentric bias of the main thinkers of Enlightenment to show how they viewed non-European (and even non-Northern European) societies either as not being at the pinnacle of history ("Universal History," in Hegel's terms) or as being outside of history entirely (as Hegel describes Africa). 

Dussel concludes with the need for a "trans-modernity" "in which both modernity and its negated alterity (the victims) co-realize themselves in a process of mutual creative fertilization" (76). 

Notes on Roger T. Ames, “Thinking through Comparisons"

Ames, Roger T. “Thinking through Comparisons: Analytical and Narrative Methods for Cultural Understanding.” Early China/Ancient Greece : Thinking Through Comparisons, edited by Steven Shankman and Stephen W. Durrant, SUNY, 2002, pp. 93-110.

I think Ames' primary point here is to distinguish the western approach to philosophical inquiry (analysis) from the Chinese approach (narrative). He argues that western approaches to philosophical understanding attempt to define what things are: "the reality behind appearance, the univocal aspect behind the many instances, the literal behind the metaphorical, the root meaning behind the history of a term's usage" (105). He suggests that language is also understood in this way--"words--our repositories of cultural interests--are a currency that on investigation are expected to yield up etymologies that not only reveal their particular historical careers, but more fundamentally bring to light their ostensive root meanings--their essential and literal definitions" (106). [There's a sense in which he does this when writing earlier about the "lineage called Confucianism" and remarks that "[i]n the Chinese language, 'the world' is shijie 世界, literally the succession of 'generational boundaries' conjoining one's own generation to those who have come before and to the generation that will follow this one" (103); my question about mentioning this is whether he's not applying a western kind of analysis to a Chinese term. Do modern Chinese people think of shijie in these terms? What is the value (for today) of this kind of "literal" definition?]

In contrast to the way that western philosophy analyzes its object, Ames argues that "the classical Chinese tradition begins with the assumption that the human being (or better, the human 'becoming') is something that one does rather than what one is; it is how one behaves within the context of the human community rather than some essential endowment that resides within one as a potential to be actualized" (106). [This reminds me of a thought that I had years back when I was looking at Tunghai University's labor education system; I had read an article about it that argued that Labor Education could help students zuo ren 做人--this idea of learning to zuo ren seemed to me to be a kind of rhetorical education in the sense that students were learn a kind of action or way of being as part of a community.] 

One point that Ames makes in the chapter concerns the "porous nature" of Chinese thought (particularly Confucianism, but I think this could be broadened--in fact, he wonders at the end of his essay whether we should be calling that narrative of Chinese thought Confucianism or Chineseness [108]). He suggests that this porousness is what has enabled Chinese thought to absorb and sinocize (sinicize?) outside philosophies such as Buddhism, etc. As part of this, he writes that "any reference to Chinese 'democratic' ideals introduces terrible equivocations: the promotion of seemingly individualistic values in the absence of Western notions of the individual, autonomy, independence, human rights, and so on" (102). This of course makes me immediately wonder what Ames would think of the democratic development of Taiwan (to the extent that Taiwan can be considered a "Chinese" society, which is of course a subject of passionate debate). I'll have to see if he has given his perspectives on this point. 

Notes on Anibal Quijano, "Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America"

Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” International Sociology, vol. 15, no. 2, 2000, pp. 215-232.

Quijano begins by discussing the role of world capitalism in the development of the idea of race, particularly in what is now known as Latin America, and the role of race in capitalism. He describes a "racist distribution of new social identities" that "combined ... with a correspondingly racist distribution of forms of work and exploitation of colonial capitalism" (217). Slavery in the Americas, he argues "was deliberately established and organized as a commodity to produce commodities for the world market, ... and it was structurally articulated with one specific 'race'" (218). Race was also a way to "homogenize" different peoples and erase their identities.  

He then moves into a discussion of the development (largely unsuccessful) of democratic nation-states in post-colonial Latin America. He argues that there is a certain dependence in Latin America on Europe in terms of social interests; that is, in some of the "Iberian countries" (the former Latin American colonies of Western Europe, mainly Portugal and Spain), there's more identification by the people in power with Europe than there is with Indigenous and Black fellow citizens: "So they [the "tiny minority who controlled the independent states and colonial societies"] did not have any 'national interests,' and they were, from the beginning as well, dependent powers, in the specific sense that they were followers of the ways and interests of foreign--but similar "racial"--powers" (227).

"In a clear way," Quijano writes, "the process of the independence of states without corresponding liberation of societies was not a process of the development of nation-states, in the European sense, but a rearticulation of the coloniality of power upon new bases" (227-8).

Notes on Arabella Lyon, "Tricky Words"

Lyon, Arabella. “Tricky Words: Rhetoric and Comparative,” Manifesting a Future for Comparative Rhetoric, symposium of Rhetoric Review, vol. 34, no. 3, 2015, pp. 243-246. 

This article is getting at the point that I mentioned in my earlier notes. Lyon argues that "Comparison and rhetoric are so troublesome that, in rhetorical research, we might not want to start with those terms as they might lead us in a circle, turning attempts to understand new [to us] cultures into only an extension of what we already know" (243). 

Looking at the term rhetoric, she suggests that despite its instability, at its heart rhetoric is about "persuasion, argumentation, reason, and truth-seeking. Inherent is the idea, even ideal, of an individual strategizing to move an audience toward singular truth or action, but this ideal is not shared by all cultures" (244). Her objection to the use of rhetoric seems to be that although it's an unstable term, perhaps it's not unstable enough. In the end, though, she accepts the term as "an acceptable placeholder" in part due to its instability (244).

Moving on to the term "comparative," she raises some of the issues brought up in Friedman's article, such as the "appropriative" and colonial nature of comparative work (245). As she argues, "Comparison is not recognizing the other, but constructing the Other because the comparer names what is compared and the theory of comparison" (246). She suggests that while it's necessary to be explicit about what we're doing, in the end that doesn't seem to be enough "unless the trajectory of constructing ontologies and epistemologies is aligned with challenge, critique, and thick description" (246). 

A few questions/comments: 

• In her discussion of the term rhetoric, she mentions the need to "focus on the particular concepts indigenous to each text's culture" (244, emphasis on "text's" my own).  Does this mean that our studies of rhetoric (or whatever term we use) are invariably about texts? What is a text? (Do we need to have culturally sensitive understandings of textuality? Does the word "text" have as much baggage as "rhetoric"?) 
• In the next paragraph, Lyons mentions her commitment to "comparative work on theories of political communication"--is this just her own focus in terms of rhetoric, or is she offering this as an alternative to the term rhetoric? What does the term "political communication" mean for different cultures? Do we need to look for analogous terms for "politics" in other languages? (Does the word "politics" carry as much baggage as the word "rhetoric"?)
• She criticizes the title of the book, Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks because it appears to her to center Greek rhetoric. But couldn't the argument of the title be also said to be de-centering Greek rhetoric by implicitly saying that while Westerners typically look at rhetoric as beginning with the Greeks (or even "belonging" to the Greco-Roman tradition), there were theories and practices of rhetoric before the Greeks and beyond the Greco-Roman tradition? I think titles also signal their moment in history (I'd say something about their "moment of enunciation" if I knew what that meant). Perhaps the title can be seen as a call for the field of rhetoric to move beyond the Greco-Roman tradition. (I'm not just bringing this up because Carol Lipson was my dissertation advisor, by the way!)

Notes on G. E. R. Lloyd, "Comparative Studies and Their Problems"

Lloyd, G. E. R. “Comparative Studies and Their Problems: Methodological Preliminaries.” Adversaries and Authorities: Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science, Cambridge UP, 1996. pp. 1-19.

Lloyd is a historian of science associated with the Needham Institute (named after Joseph Needham, who collaborated on a series of books about Science and Civilization in China), so this chapter is coming from a different perspective than that of Friedman, who's coming from comparative literature. Let's see how these two essays compare!

One of the first points he addresses is the question, "what does it mean to use the term 'science' at all in this context" (1)? [Interestingly, perhaps because she doesn't explicitly emphasize the idea of "comparative literature"--although it's clearly the perspective from which she's coming--Friedman doesn't ask about how the term "literature" figures into her analysis. Maybe this is because the question of what "literature" is has been dealt with elsewhere in comparative literature? (I think it has, but I don't have any sources on that at hand.) In comparative rhetoric, as I think is evidenced by some of the other articles we'll be reading in this seminar, the question of how or whether to use the term "rhetoric" has come up frequently.]

In response to this question, Lloyd calls on us to focus on "what the ancient investigators themselves thought they wee trying to do, their conceptions of their subject-matter, their aims and goals" (2), rather than on interpreting what they were doing from a modern perspective on what science is. He admits that it's impossible to completely identify with the ancient investigators or, on the other hand, simply accept what they say. But we need to start with what they saw as their subject. [It's notable, perhaps, that Friedman didn't say much about this, the "native's" viewpoint. I think Escobar said more about it in his essay.]

A second question is what we can achieve in this kind of comparative study. Here he mentions the problems of the archive: what has survived, what hasn't, and why (if we can know why); and how have later interpretations crept into the texts that have been transmitted up to today.

The third question he asks is about how we should do such comparative study. Here he argues against generalization and taking a "piecemeal" approach. He points out the need for considering the contexts (both in terms of sociohistorical contexts and domains of science) and not generalize about "Chinese" and "Greek" ways of thinking. (This includes generalizing within domains, such as "medicine"--assuming Hippocratic medicine is the standard in ancient Greece, and even assuming that Hippocratic medicine is homogeneous itself.) The piecemeal approach has the opposite problem--to look at a particular topic in Greek science and try to find "the Chinese equivalent" wrongly assumes that "there is  a single set of theories or concepts fundamental to early science that will turn out to play analogous roles in both China and Greece" (5-6). [This is one of the criticisms of some types of comparative rhetoric, as has been mentioned--for instance, looking for a Chinese term that is analogous to the term rhetoric.]

Lloyd goes on to argue that the basic thing to consider when trying to compare Chinese and Greek science, is what questions they were trying to answer. He admits that this is a difficult task that involves some speculation, since they would rarely if ever explain what their questions were. But, giving the example of the Greek contentions over the concept of elements, he tries to show what was probably at stake in these debates. "All of this means," he concludes, "that the agenda that we set ourselves must ... include (even if it is not limited by) the inquiry into the conditions under which knowledge, or what passed for it, was produced, and the conditions under which those who claimed to do the producing worked" (16). 

On top of that, he argues that we need to consider the values and social contexts into which these inquires fit--"[w]e have to go into the perceived or assumed values of philosophy and science, what they were thought to be for, and that takes us inexorably into the values of the society in which the philosophers and scientists operated" (16-17). 

Finally (at least for the purpose of my notes), he argues that "the contents of philosophical, and medical, debates cannot, or rather should not, be divorced from the modes of conduct of the debates themselves (written or oral, real or imaginary), including styles of adversariality, or consensuality, adopted, the appropriation or rejection of others', or of traditional, views, the whole gamut of the variety fo the tactics of persuasion" (18). The rhetoric, if I dare use the term. 

Notes on Susan Stanford Friedman's "Why Not Compare?"

Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Why Not Compare?” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 3, 2011, pp. 753–762., doi:10.1632/pmla.2011.126.3.753.

Friedman's article is coming out of comparative literature, which has, I suppose, a longer institutional history than comparative rhetoric; not surprisingly, then, scholars in comparative literature (as her bibliography shows) have been thinking for a longer time about what comparison is and what the ethics/politics are of comparison. 

Friedman begins this article by listing out some arguments against comparison, which mainly have to do with epistemological (?) and political concerns, such as the unequal relations that often characterize the things being compared. She gives an example from Radhakrishnan, who, hearing his language described as "the Italian of the East," wondered why Italian wouldn't be called "the Telugu of the West" (754). As Friedman writes, "In making Italian the basis for knowing Telugu, the comparison replicates a system of dominance on a global scale" (754). 

She goes on to point out an argument that comparisons might also suffer from an "epistemological instrumentalism build into metaphoric thought as a form of analogy" (754). This she explains in terms of I. A. Richards' analysis of metaphor into the "vehicle" and the "tenor," suggesting that the tenor (the concept being explained) takes precedence over the vehicle (the image or figure used to explain the tenor). The question is whether in the case of a comparison of literary (or rhetorical) texts, the tenor is the "other" text or the familiar one.

Another point against comparison is that it tends to decontextualize both things being compared. I guess the idea is that doing comparative work makes it impossible to provide all the historical and cultural specificity needed to truly understand the things being compared in their totality (or makes it difficult? or is it just that scholars don't usually go into that depth?).

[All this reminded me of a passage from Georgius Candidius' comparison of Sirayan eloquence to the rhetoric of Demosthenes: "At their eloquence I have been thoroughly astonished, for I actually believe Demosthenes himself could not have been more eloquent of have had a greater selection of words at his command" (15, translation from Formosa under the Dutch by William Campbell). In this case, we have a representative of a colonial power (the Dutch) comparing the Sirayan people to a classical Athenian orator; this clearly suggests Candidius' familiarity with the classical tradition (and assumes that his readers would also be familiar with that tradition), assuming, not surprisingly, a closer connection to the ancient Greeks than to the Indigenous Formosans. So in thinking of this in terms of vehicles and tenors: in this case, it seems to me that the tenor is Sirayan eloquence and the vehicle is Demosthenes. 

In looking for this quote, I came across an article by Christopher Joby, called "The Reception of Classical Authors in Taiwan," from the International Journal of the Classical Tradition. Joby makes the interesting point that Candidius might have been making this comparison to challenge the perception that the Siraya were "savages"--"[h]e probably hoped that he could use this argument to justify attempts to convert the Siraya to Christianity, which was his main purpose in engaging with them" (331). ]

Friedman goes on to list reasons for comparison, which include the "cognitive imperative," "the social of cultural imperative," and the "epistemological and political consequences of not comparing." The last one includes the idea that comparing "enables theory" by allowing people to generalize based on patterns observed. It also includes the value of defamiliarization as a way of realizing the cultural practices of one's own community or group are not necessarily universally practiced. She also argues that the value of the "decontextualization" mentioned earlier is that things being compared can be recontextualized: "A literary text, for example, has many potential contexts, not just linguistic, national, temporal, or generic. The refusal to compare texts from different places, times, or cultures privileges one kind of context (temporal-spatial) and renders other contexts invisible" (757).

Finally, she describes three approaches (adding that these are not the only approaches) to comparison that might avoid the dangers discussed above and (on the other hand) the dullness of the "standard pedagogical exercise of 'compare and contrast'" (757). She suggests "a comparative methodology that is juxtapositional, contrapuntal, and reciprocal, thus opening the possibility for a progressive politics of comparison" (758). The idea here is to put things next to each other ("collision"), problematize both objects of comparison in connection to each other ("reciprocal defamiliarization"), and/or create a "cultural collage" that "radical[ly] juxtapos[es] ... texts from different geohistorical and cultural locations ... Put side by side, each in its own distinctive context, but read together for their in/commensurability, texts in collage produce new insights about each, as well as new theoretical insights" (759). 

One point she makes in an endnote made me think of something I was thinking about in relation to the article by Escobar. He had mentioned that the MC project argues that power should be considered when thinking about cultural difference, rather than ignoring the fact that comparisons of culture have often (usually? always?) been done in relations of asymmetric power relations. In one endnote, Friedman points to studies that "see comparison as an agent of both colonization and decolonization" (760, n. 5); in another, she argues, "Arguments that regard comparison as the product of a post-1500 Western modernity (e.g., Harootunian; Chow; Layoun; Shih) ignore how the mobility and intercultural contact that characterize millennia of human history have always engendered comparison" (760, n. 8). This point led me to think about the potential value of pointing out the differences between what has "always engendered comparison" and the "post-1500 western modernity" type of comparison that occurred in contexts of colonization. In other words, compare the different motives for comparison!

Notes on Arturo Escobar, "Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise"

Escobar, Arturo. "Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program." Cultural Studies, vol. 21, nos. 2-3, 2007, pp. 179 210.

I read this article today in preparation for the RSA Summer Institute that I mentioned previously. Here, I'm going to write down some notes, comments, and questions I had about the article.

Escobar's article summarizes the general features of the "Modernity/Coloniality" (MC) research program that has its roots in Latin American thought about the origins of modernity and the possibility of thinking outside of a Eurocentric perspective on modernity, which tends to view its own version of modernity in universalist terms and tends to ignore the role of colonialism in the development of European modernity. The MC project argues for viewing modernity as being rooted in colonialism and calls for (among other things) the recognition of "the domination of others outside of the European core as a necessary dimension of modernity, with the concomitant subalternization of the knowledge and cultures of these other groups" (184). 

Another important element of the MC program is the concept of "exteriority" (Dussel) and "border thinking" (Mignolo). The former, emphasizes Escobar, is not meant to be "thought about as a pure outside, untouched by the modern. The notion of exteriority does not entail an ontological outside; it refers to an outside that is precisely constituted as difference by a hegemonic discourse" (186). (This reminded me of Mary Louise Pratt's conception of autoethnographic writing, which is a kind of description or depiction of oneself that engages with what she calls "metropolitan" representations of the [nonhegemonic] self.)

"Border thinking" requires one to change not "the contents but the very terms of conversation" (187). [To give a possibly relevant example from a letter I read during my dissertation research: In the early days of Tunghai University, students--I believe history majors--had written to John King Fairbank, the famous American scholar of Chinese history, to get his support for the development of a graduate program in Chinese history at Tunghai. Fairbank wrote back with what I thought at the time was a wise answer: he suggested that rather than focus graduate studies on Chinese history, it would be more valuable to insert Chinese perspectives into the various courses and disciplines taught at Tunghai, so that, for instance, courses in science would include Chinese scientific thought. As I say, at the time I thought this would be difficult to do, but that it would be an important development to show Chinese contributions to the disciplines. But the idea of border thinking has me wondering if it isn't more important to "change the terms of conversation"--in other words, address Chinese thought from its own perspective rather than trying to shove it into Western-made silos. This is true of rhetoric as well, as has been discussed at length by a lot of scholars of comparative rhetoric (this will probably come up in future posts as I read more from some of those scholars). Reading over this, I'm not sure it's an entirely relevant example; maybe if we look at it from a wider perspective in thinking about the relations between Fairbank and the students at Tunghai, as well as their motivations for what they wanted... I think I need to find copies of that letter again. (I can't remember if I copied them or not...)]

Escobar writes, though, that this border thinking "is not a question of replacing existing epistemologies either; these will certainly continue to exist and as such will remain viable as spaces of, and for, critique" (187). In addition to western internal critiques of modernity, he says that Mignolo calls for "critique(s) arising from colonial difference" to be included in the conversation, giving rise to "'pluritopic hermeneutics' ... , a possibility of thinking from different spaces which finally breaks away from eurocentrism as sole epistemological perspective" (187-88). 

Escobar also says that the MC project stresses the idea that cultural difference should not be just viewed from a relativistic perspective (as is sometimes done in studies of intercultural communication), but should emphasize "the power dimension" (189). [This brought me back to thinking about Pratt and the idea that cultural differences could be seen as differences produced by colonialism. That is, communicating between cultures has not been primarily a conversation among equals, but has been a "conversation" (?) between groups in "highly asymmetrical relations of power" (to borrow Pratt's language).]

Skipping ahead, I'll mention that Escobar had three areas that he thought the MC project should take up in their work--important perspectives that were missing from their approach. The first was gender. He argues that feminist theory, especially as it has become more attuned to and inclusive of global perspectives, should be engaged with for not only its discussion of women's rights but also for its "concerns with subjectivity and identity" (195). Here he points particularly to queer theory and its "de-essentialization of identity[, which] means taking all identities seriously" (195). 

The second perspective is ecological--he argues that the "split [between nature and culture] might be equally formative of modernity than the civilized/other (us/them) binary" (197). "By privileging subaltern knowledges of the natural," he argues, the Latin American political ecology "articulates in unique ways the questions of diversity, difference, and inter-culturality--with nature, of course, occupying a role as actor and agent" (198).

Finally, he argues for the need for "new economic imaginaries" (198). Here he also brings in gender and ecology to argue that along with them, "economic difference and alternative economic imaginaries should also have a place-based dimension" (198-99). He sees a "certain convergence here between the projects of feminism, ecology, and alternative economies and this convergence is articulated around the politics of place" (199). 

One final point that is important to my own project: he (and those others working on the MC project) view this research project as not just being about Latin America (as the object of study in a traditional area studies sense). "In short," Escobar writes, "the MC research program is a framework constructed from the Latin American periphery of the modern colonial world system; it helps explain the dynamics of eurocentrism in the making of modernity and attempts to transcend it" (189). This means that while it's a Latin American perspective, it is potentially relevant to other regions, particularly those colonial or postcolonial places that have experienced Eurocentric domination. Some of my thoughts here are how it might be applied to Taiwan, which was multiply colonized by the Dutch and the Spanish, Han settler colonialism, the Qing, the Japanese, and the Chinese Nationalists over the years. What varieties of modernity came from these encounters, and what kinds of border thinking might be done here? (And how/what might this tell us about rhetorical practices in Taiwan?)

[Update, 5/9: I wanted to add a couple of terms that I think will come up later on in the readings: pluriversality, which comes from Mignolo but doesn't seem to be defined in Escobar, but seems connected to the "pluritopic hermeneutics" mentioned above; and mundialización, which seems to emphasize diversity more than "globalization" does--as Escobar puts it, "mundialización brings to the fore the manifold local histories that, in questioning global designs (e.g., neo-liberal globalization), aim at forms of globality that arise out of ‘cultures of transience’ that go against the cultural homogeneity fostered by such designs" (188-89).]

Some more play with ChatGPT

This evening, my wife and I were playing with ChatGPT to see how it translates from Japanese and Chinese. I remembered that I had once translated a passage about rhetoric from Tseng Yueh-nung, the first president of Tunghai University. It's written in a more literary style (although it is fairly understandable if you read modern Chinese), so I wanted to test ChatGPT on it. Here are the results:

Me: Translate: 希臘羅馬政治即臻全盛，日中則昃。於是道德淪亡，人懷自競之心，挾數任術，以獵取功名而致富貴。雄辯學 (rhetoric)，逐為必修之科。整體教育反失去重心，一時消極與失望，詭詐與荒瑩，籠罩全歐，不可救藥，如是者數百年。

ChatGPT: During the heyday of Greek and Roman politics, the situation in China and Japan was declining. As a result, morality decayed, and people harbored a sense of rivalry, employing any number of schemes to hunt for fame, wealth, and status. The study of rhetoric became a mandatory subject. Overall, education lost its focus, leading to passivity and despair, deceit and confusion, enveloping all of Europe for hundreds of years, with no hope of recovery.

Me (somewhat rudely): 日中則昃 doesn't have anything to do with Japan and China. It's talking about the sun at its zenith declining.

ChatGPT: You are correct, I apologize for the mistake. "日中則昃" is a Chinese idiom that means "the sun is at its zenith and then begins to decline," and it has nothing to do with Japan and China as I previously stated. Here's the corrected translation:

At the height of Greek and Roman politics, the sun was at its zenith and then began to decline, just as the morality of society began to decline. People became competitive, using various means to pursue fame and fortune. The study of eloquence and rhetoric became a required subject. Overall, education lost its focus, leading to a period of passivity and despair, deceit and confusion, that enveloped all of Europe for several hundred years, and seemed irreparable.

I think it did a decent job on the revised translation. It makes the comparison between the sun's decline and the decline of morality in society more obvious with "just as," which is not (I don't think) in the Chinese original (於是 is more like "therefore" or "as a result," not "just as"). So it's taking an implicit comparison and making it explicit. 

We tried ChatGPT with 陋室銘 by 劉禹錫. My wife got a similar kind of situation with the last line, "孔子云：「何陋之有？」", which it translated as something like "What does it matter if it's humble as long as I am at peace?" I generated 10 translations but never got that version. Here's what I got for the last sentence:

1.  Confucius said, "What does it matter if the room is humble?"
2. Confucius said: "What does it matter that the room is simple?"
3. Confucius said, "What does it matter if it's humble?"
4. Confucius said, "How humble it is, yet how significant!" [Hmmm... this one is interesting...]
5. Confucius said, "What humble abodes can also have admirable qualities?" [Hmmm...]
6. Confucius said, "How can a humble abode be considered inferior?"
7. Confucius said, "What does being shabby matter?"
8. Confucius said, "What is humble can also be distinguished."
9. Confucius said, "What does it matter that it is humble?"
10. Confucius said, "What is humble about it?" [I think ChatGPT was getting tired here...]

I looked for some English translations online. This one by Abby Lu notes that "Confucius actually said: ‘What is ugly about the home of a gentleman?’, the latter of which the author cut out of humility." (子曰：君子居之，何陋之有？). See also this translation (an interesting website, by the way!). 

Anyway, I'm getting off-track now, and I should go to bed so I can get back to my book review tomorrow. My book review is coming along well, by the way (thanks for asking); I think I'll be able to get a good draft of it done by Friday. 

Some slight changes of plan

I'm a bit behind on my book review; I had hoped to finish it by the end of the month, but my allergies have been bothering me a lot lately, which has slowed my work down. I'm still hoping to finish it by the end of next week. 

After that, I had originally planned to read Xiaoye You's new book, but I just got the syllabus for the RSA Summer Institute seminar that I'm participating in on decolonizing comparative rhetorics. We're going to be reading about 19 articles/chapters of various lengths, most of which I haven't read before, so I'd better get a start on that work. I also need to write a short bio statement and resurrect a work-in-progress to get it in good enough shape that I'm not embarrassed to share it. (That's due May 18; coincidentally, the most recent draft of my paper is dated May 18, 2021...)

So once I get that book review draft done, I'll try to write a few notes here on the articles I'm reading for this seminar. We'll see how that goes. 

Grading done; now to get to work...

I just finished my grading, so now (well, probably tomorrow) I'll get to work to get an early start on my fellowship leave. First I have to write a book review, which will first involve reading the book! I hope to get all that done by the end of April. Then I'll be getting into the other pile of books and articles that I need to read. 

I've been thinking that to keep myself honest, I should make some notes on my readings here, sort of like what I was doing for my dissertation on my old Kun zhi ji blog (which, surprisingly, still exists!). I never got much feedback on my notes in that blog, though Kerim Friedman once responded to a post about "the literacy crisis in postwar Taiwan," And William Starosta responded to a post about two of his articles on intercultural rhetoric that I had been reading. 

So... I guess if you see me writing some notes on your book or article, feel free to respond. I would appreciate your thoughts, questions, corrections, and/or praise (ahem), all of which will keep me honest in this task I'm setting up for myself. 

Some notes on Yang Tsui's (楊翠) 《永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作》

楊翠, 《永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作》，蔚藍文化， 2016。 Yang Tsui, Never Give Up: Yang Kui's Resistance, Labor, and Writing. Azure Books, 2016.

I finished reading this book on April 3 (I always write the date that I finished a book on the cover page, just to remind myself). Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to write or even think about it because of end-of-the-semester grading that I'm buried in. I'll try now to write down some notes on some of the points from the book that stood out for me. This will be very impressionistic for now; perhaps I'll come back to some of these in some later posts if there's interest. 

In more-or less chronological order, here's some of what I remember from the book without looking at it (this is a good exercise, by the way):

• Yang Kui's idea of countering Japanese “history” with his own writing;
• The variety of genres he worked in, including some that it seems he invented (I’m thinking here of his 報告文學 (literary reportage) and 街頭劇 (street performance/plays), etc.);
• His arguments during the early postwar years (before he went to prison in Green Island) with mainlanders (Yang Tsui calls them "authors who came from China" [中國來台作家]) who dismissed the idea of a “Taiwanese” literature;
• His friendships with other mainlanders, like the philosopher Xu Fuguan (徐復觀) and the novelist Chiang Kuei (姜貴), who visited Yang at his Tunghai Garden, where he lived after he got out of prison;
• His relationship with his wife Ye Tao (葉陶) and his granddaughter Yang Tsui (and how Yang Tsui writes about their relationship);
• His insistence on sticking on principles, even when at times it plunged his family (even deeper) into poverty; 
• The writing and editing work he did in prison on Green Island

My initial reaction to Yang Tsui's portrayal of Yang Kui's incarceration on Green Island--the earlier parts of her depiction of his writing and publishing in the prison's poster-newspaper (壁報) New Life (新生活), his writing and production of plays, etc.-- was that not only was his time in prison very productive for him, but that it was arguably pretty enjoyable. He didn’t have to worry about family responsibilities, for instance, and could focus on creative work. Yang Tsui also mentions times when Ye Tao and their second son Yang Jian (楊建) were able to visit him for up to half a month. 

But then after reading through all that and thinking that Green Island wasn’t so bad, I was brought up short by Yang Tsui's description of the difficulties his family experienced during that time--the trouble they had keeping body and soul together (exacerbated by Yang’s requests--even demands--for money to buy him medicine), for instance, and the social stigma of having a husband/father in prison. On Yang’s side of things, he tried to communicate with his family through letters, but there was a limit to how much he was allowed to write (300 characters per letter) , so evidently a lot of letters didn’t get sent. In fact, at one point he was punished by not being allowed to write anything to his family for three months (p. 216). Yang Tsui describes his letters to his family, which appear to have been kept in his "New Life Notebooks" (新生筆記簿), as him trying to be a father by instructing his children. Yang Tsui characterizes him as a "Green Island Teacher Chang" (綠島張老師; "Teacher Chang" is an organization in Taiwan devoted to youth counseling).

I found myself wanting to know more about Ye Tao, who is portrayed--during the Japanese period in particular--as being a more outgoing and vocal person than Yang, one who gave speeches and taught, while Yang was more a quiet writerly type of person. She kind of disappears into the background later on, always standing behind him and taking on a supporting role, though it’s clear that she tried to hold the family together while he was in prison. 

After Ye Tao died when Yang and his family had been living at Tunghai Garden, his children all moved away to have their own lives. For some reason, they allowed Yang Kui to take care of his young granddaughter Yang Tsui, something that she doesn’t seem to have enjoyed (though she blames herself as much as she blames him for the troubles they had). Later in life, when she was in college, she wanted to help him write his biography (she was majoring in history at Fu Jen University at the time), but seemed not to be able to get to that when he was alive. 

I enjoyed reading about the life of Yang Kui from the point of view of his granddaughter. I'm not sure how I'd characterize this book--perhaps part biography, part memoir. Yang Tsui spent much of her childhood living with her grandfather at his 東海花園 (Tunghai Garden) home near Tunghai University, and later in her book, she writes about that experience in third-person voice, perhaps to distance her current self from the stubborn and ungrateful person she portrays her childhood self as being. Later on, after she tells of Yang Kui's death in 1985, Yang Tsui attaches a postcript called "Confessions of a Garden Girl" (花園女孩懺情錄), in which she describes (this time in the first person) her last few years with Yang Kui, including when she was a senior at Fu-Jen and lived with him in a house in the hills belonging to a friend of his. She moved out with the excuse that she needed to live closer to the university so she could study more for graduate school entrance exams instead of spending a lot of time commuting. She seems to blame this decision for her grandfather's death. 

In a sense, then, this book acts as a kind of penance for Yang Tsui, as she suggests in this postscript when she writes that "this book is an inscription of more than 30 years of penance" (這本書，銘刻著超過三十年的精神苦行).   

There's a lot more I could say about this book, and I will try to dig into some of those topics I listed above at some point if I get a chance. I think Yang Kui is someone I'm going to have to research in more depth.

Wrapping up another semester; beginning something new

I have about a week left of the semester, so I've been doing a lot of reading/commenting on student work recently. I have a draft of my blog post on Yang Tsui's book about her grandfather, Yang Kui, but it's not in any shape yet to meet its public. Maybe I'll have some time to work on it tomorrow.

Some good news is that my application for a Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Fellowship (a one-semester leave--a "sabbatical" by any other name) was approved, so I'll be spending the fall reading and (hopefully) writing a lot about comparative rhetoric and Taiwan history, literature, rhetoric, in order to work on an article and design a comparative rhetoric course. By coincidence, in my first-year writing course this afternoon we were doing some reflective writing about this past semester for the sake of a final reflective piece I'm asking them to write--a letter to their future selves giving themselves advice, warning, encouragement for future writing tasks. I was doing "loop writing" (focused freewriting) on some prompts provided by Elbow and Belanoff in their 1989 book, A Community of Writers. One of the prompts was about the physical aspects of writing, and I wrote this:

Physical: One of the things I’m going to have to think about as I work this summer and into next semester is how I’m going to do the physical work of writing. I’m always taken by Jonathan Spence’s acknowledgements in The Search for Modern China where he thanks the staff of a pizza place near Yale, where he would work on his book. I wonder how he did it. There was a Twitter thread that mentioned that he wrote on legal pads, but I also wonder if he brought books or archival photocopies, etc. with him. I remember when I was working on my dissertation, sometimes I would bring photocopies of archival documents with me to McDonald’s or Starbucks or Dante [a café] or wherever, and I would have a spiral-ring notebook in which I’d write ideas down, sometimes just copying stuff from the archival docs. I used different colors for the quotes vs. for my own ideas. At some point I suppose that I probably would then copy some of that stuff to my computer. Nowadays I don’t imagine doing that kind of thing, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to try that out. I have a lot of books that I have to read for this “sabbatical.” Maybe some of the days when I go out to work (whether it be a coffee shop or a library), I can just take one or two of the books I want to work on and a notebook in which I can take notes and write out my ideas longhand. I haven’t done that in so long. I don’t think I’ve done that kind of work since I finished my dissertation back in 2011. I don’t necessarily have to do this every time I go out (I didn’t do it every time back then, even), but maybe some days I can ditch the computer. (Wish I could ditch my cellphone too, but that doesn’t sound like a good idea.) The purpose for this would be, hopefully, to get me to concentrate on my reading and writing rather than spending a lot of energy fighting the urge to check my email or Twitter or something else or to look up something on the internet that ends up taking me down a rabbit hole. ... Yeah. I guess I’ll invest in notebook and try this out.

So I am copying this here in part to remind myself of this and to ask all of my reader to remind me about this idea: try writing longhand sometimes. Get away from the computer. (Here's a link to my post about Jonathan Spence's acknowledgements.)