Not One over the Other, but One next to Another: Relation-Building through Connection and Disconnection

As our survey of global rhetorical practices and methodologies comes to a close, I cannot help but to think that this last week’s readings have served as the perfect synthesizing focus for our written and oral discussions this semester. As I believe Travis may have noted in class, the notions of nonessentialist identity and translingualism seem to speak to the “goals” of Global Rhetorics. Too often, our desire to understand other cultures and their rhetorics on our own terms wins out over our countervailing intention to practice the form of rhetorical restraint for which Laurie Gries advocates, a restraint that forces us to silence our colonizing interpretations in order to “hear” the buried voices of unfamiliar selves—not to be referred to as illiterate, unintelligible “others.” Thus, we return to harmful binary constructions that pit East against West, First-World nations against Third-world nations, literacy against orality, English against every other language, and self against other.

Accordingly, every thought—spoken or not—every “contribution” to our understanding of global rhetorical practices, epistemologies, and methodologies, has involved cognitive contestation. From our first day of class to this past one, my mind has been at war. Saturated with a Western identity and ideology, how could I ever dismantle my terministic screen, a screen that stimulates my hand to write “Foucault,” “Barthes,” “Derrida,” “Bakhtin,” or “Burke” in the margins of the works we’ve read? Is this not an example of the very interpretive colonization that we’ve been working to circumvent? Are these voices not poised, ready to invade the worlds symbolically constructed by others? Or, does the relegation of these influential voices to the “margins” of the pages enact an apt metaphor for a healthy method of gaining entrance to the discipline of Global Rhetorics? As a scholar, as a writer, I am the product of what I have read. I should not erase my history any more than I should the histories of the unfamiliar selves from whom I wish to learn. However, the validation of my history, my voice in this context, does not relinquish me of the responsibility I have to place myself in uncomfortable situations, to embrace unfamiliarity, and to make associations when appropriate while at the same time being unafraid to make healthy dissociations, too.

Thus, in the construction of our network of global rhetorical concerns, Ashley, Travis and I very quickly recognized the need to mitigate our collective desire to privilege connections over disconnections. As scholars of Global Rhetorics, we want to make connections, between ourselves and our practices and the selves and practices of rhetors from other spatio-temporal situations, and this desire is not mal-intentioned, albeit it does not account for productive disconnections that can be made. I believe it was this balancing act that made the construction of our network so difficult at first. In our initial attempts, we had drawn inflexible connections between bifurcated concepts, like “nation-state and community” and “national identity and cultural identity.” These connections inhibited us from creating the robust network that we know Global Rhetorics demands. These binaries betrayed a hierarchy that did not allow us to consider how other concepts and themes related to these ones. In order to complete the assignment, then, we had to start over and determine some overarching concerns that we recognized in each reading (implicitly or explicitly) and branch out from there.

As globalization has become more prevalent, we noticed that issues of identity and language seemed to be the biggest concerns. Globalization often imposes an essentializing script—on difference in both identity politics and language. The construction of nonessentialist selves, though, occurs through conceptualization of the self and identity politics as predicated upon complex matrices of relation, and it was this conceptualization of the self that seemed to inform our complex network of relations that we constructed for Global Rhetorics. Levinas asserts that “the self is constructed not in opposition to the other, as in the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, but rather is grounded in responsibility for the other” (qtd. in Cooper 91). Constructing a network that follows from Hegelian dialectics inhibits generative global study of rhetorics. For example, in her essay “Muslim-American Scripts,” Saba Fatima substantiates responsibility to others as essential for the formation of nonessential identities in her excoriation of the “subconscious desire” for Muslim-Americans “to disconnect [them]selves from complicity in the consequences of sanctions imposed by the United States against ‘our own,’” claiming that “[b]y not being politically active, [Muslim-Americans] distance [them]selves from policy decisions that affect Muslims around the world, thus keeping in abeyance any feelings of responsibility” (Fatima 345). By “shirking” their responsibility to contest unhealthy generalizations of Muslims across the world, Muslim-Americans allow xenophobic, myopic voices to determine their identities for them. Historically, these conceptions of relation and responsibility have been oppressed and even repressed by identity politics that always position one entity—in this case, political and news media in the United States—over another, never next to another.

In our network, then, we wanted to show a complex relation of “selves,” the concepts and themes, operating next to one another, in a form of responsibility to one another. However, as we started drafting, we noticed that we needed to become more cognizant of the ontology of the connections we sought to make. For the most part, globalization has enticed scholars to define connection through a Burkean negativism: connection is connection because it shall not be disconnection. We make connections because we see disconnections, but this can be problematic for a multitude of reasons, two of which being that this reason for connection often erases difference and prioritizes dominant discursive scripts. A more significant reason is that it limits our understanding of connection. For one, we do not understand what connection actually means apart from disconnection, but we also impose upon connection a flat definition. Are all connections the same? Are there not multiple types of connections?

When constructing our network, then, we were forced to consider how we would connect each node. At first, we used arrows which linked one node to another, but some of our nodes seemed to resist this form of one-sided connection. We then tried connections between nodes with arrows going both ways, but it became difficult to determine how much give-and-take actually took place between the nodes. We also tried constructing lines which denoted connections across nodes, but it seemed as if certain nodes became less important in these connections, acting only as waypoints between “more significant” nodes. In a sense, our terms enacted a form of resistance to connection, to identification, that we had not anticipated in the slightest. However, this was a healthy resistance as Cooper notes that identity politics should not be “seen as a process of control,” but “as resisting control” (93). Thus, our mapping allowed us to see that connections cannot often be subjected to control. By noticing how certain nodes resisted connection to, between, or across other nodes, we could be more mindful about the connections we made—and the disconnections we made, too. For instance, in placing nodes next to one another, the impulse was always to make a connection between them, but we also began to consider what could be said in “making” a disconnection between two related nodes.

For example, Lisa Arnold’s explanation of the SPC faculty members’ decision to provide “students with consistent instruction in English” as a means of granting students “direct ‘access…to nearly all that is valuable both old and new’” (284) highlights the connections and disconnections we forged between our two overarching concepts. While language grants access to certain communicators, it may not always foster Cooper’s idealized identity politics that stem from relation-building and responsibility to and for others. Thus, our “language” node could connect across “access” and “community,” but it could not connect to or across “relational” or “responsive.” Language certainly plays a role in identity construction, but English is often characterized as a language which functions on a dominant discursive script of erasure and essentialism. As Arnold argues, instruction of and in English can, though, lead to a different form of community identity formation that is not always plagued by homogenizing monlingualism, for, “[w]hile languages inevitably carry with them the traces of their originating cultures, they are at the same time flexible enough to accommodate new ideas, values, and beliefs” (286).

As globalization continues to occur, we cannot let our desire to make connections inhibit healthy disconnections. While the introduction of the English language to foreign cultures expands networks of communication, it does not and cannot erase distance, space. As we continue to explore the rhetoric of nations, cultures, and peoples across the globe, we must keep in mind Arnold’s assertion that English functions differently as it enters and exits various cultural, communal, and national spaces. No two Englishes are perfectly translatable. Understanding this will help us to move toward a knowledge and practice of rhetoric that does not lead to essentialist identity politics and erasure of literacy practices.