Tuesday's discussion of our own particular approach to "Global Rhetorics" led to some fruitful consideration of the various things we might study or observe, including:
- methodologies (how and why)
- pedagogies (their foundations and challenges)
- qualities, characteristics, or the metis of certain traditions
- critical questions (i.e., having to do with feminist theory, postmodernity, postcolonialism, etc.)
- cultural questions or phenomena (i.e., migration, colonization, cyberutopianism, war, etc.)
- particular aspects or general theories of argumentation, advocacy, or democracy.
It is my hope that, through these things, our commitments to historiography and meta-criticism will be satisfied, and you will find yourselves at no lack of questions to mine or things to discover in your RNF projects.
As promised, I include some highlights from your discussion of three theorists, where each theorist demonstrates some unpacking of how "knowledge production and consumption become tethered to power asymmetry" (Mao 453):
LuMing Mao aims to enrich our understanding of the other, and of "other communicative practices across language, culture, and time" (450) by nurturing a recent turn to "how" (not "what"), i.e., facts of usage over facts of essence. Rhetorical/hermeneutic goal of understanding: that we (critics) would simply begin to know about and speak for it (453); that we might step outside a Euro-American locus of logic and relations (453).
Wendy Hesford aims to convince us that globalization has polarizing and democratizing functions, and therefore needs to be reshaped as a kind of critical cosmopolitanism, diminishing the assumption that material localities always control epistemological locations. She argues for "global citizenship" that is rhetorically and ideologically free from the language of fear, where collisions between our physical/national desires and our dialogic methods can occur (795). Critical/pedagogical goal of promoting a global rhetorical agenda that does not merely localize interests (796) and that challenges the "dialectic of recognition" (796-7), mostly through discourse analysis and rhetorical criticism -- i.e., "critical methods and frameworks that work toward more peaceful and just resolutions" (788).
Linda Tuhiwai Smith aims to help us realize the historical relationship between imperialism and "the indigenous experience" as well as the role of both researchers and indigenous subjects in their domination (21). The indigenous experience is problematic in a critical sense (as well as a social and cultural sense). Histories, narratives, and theories need to be decolonized and written indigenously (41). Productive/participatory goal of changing or revising the "localized discursive fields" that situate metis arguments (23).
Framework questions are included here, as well as a list of key terms that we may help to re/define this semester.
I'm truly looking forward to the coming weeks,
-Dr. Graban
