Mapping Global Rhetorics

As Travis mentioned in his post, our concept map veered more into the conceptual than the visual. We decided to create a map that allowed us to think more about the ways in which historiography was done, but felt that most of our readings could be classified as comparative or historical. However, many readings certainly stretched across both categories. As we made our map, we thought it would be interesting to map the locations discussed in the readings along with the physical locations of the authors themselves.

With the exception of Richard Enos, all of the authors and scholars mentioned in the readings were completely new to me. I was curious to see if the comparative rhetoric we had read so far was primarily originating in the US looking outward, or less centralized. Seeing Meghan and Stephanie’s map and then reading their reflections made me more aware of the rhetoric and composition programs around the world—but as Stephanie posted, there were difficulties finding many of these international programs. This made me wonder where exactly comparative rhetoric is being done—Dr. Graban pointed out the distinction between intercultural and international—does it matter if we’re doing intercultural work rather than international?

If we were to revise our map, I think we could add more detailed information about the connections between authors and subjects. While it was interesting to note that most of the authors, with the exception of Smith, were currently working at American universities, I think knowing more specifically which scholars (and how many) were studying different rhetorical traditions would be fascinating. The readings for these two weeks have addressed with differing approaches Hesford’s goal to “identify the emergent trends in these interlocking fields, paying particular attention to the methodological challenges we face as we turn towards the global” (788).

She advocates for greater “coalition-building” across the humanities, but I was left wondering, exactly to what end? Obviously, reexamining the ways comparative rhetoricians “take for granted the nation-state and citizen-subject as units of analysis and ignore the global forces shaping individual lives and literate practices” addresses in part Smith’s concerns on the colonizing influence of academic study of indigenous people and cultures.

When trying to place the different comparative rhetorical study in our map, there seemed some significantly different approaches—when outlining the potential questions his research could address, Kennedy hopes for a “general theory of rhetoric that will apply in all societies” (Kennedy 1). By arguing for a rhetoric present even in nonhuman actors, Kennedy’s work addresses that general theory. While considering rhetoric as “a form of energy that drives and is imparted to communication” definitely broadly redefines my own understanding of rhetoric, the idea that we can find a “general theory” for rhetorics across the globe has troubling implications (Kennedy 215). Such a theory is appealing, but would it essentialize?

Mao gets to this problem in Aristotelian-style, Western approach to examining the rhetoric of other cultures. He argues, “the central question to ask is not “What is rhetoric in/for these other cultures?” but “What does the other do in/with rhetoric, and how does the other do it?”” (Mao 450). I think one way we can do this is through rhetorical hermeneutics—the type of historiography that, as Mailloux argues, focuses on the context in addition to the primary text in an attempt to “do” history. Our small group in class brought up the relative benefits and difficulties of working with translation when we discussed Arabic rhetoric as defined by Al-Musawi and Borrowman.  Concluding this blog post, I’m realizing that I’m still left with more questions than answers when it comes to how we do comparative rhetorics. But I think that’s okay—I’m looking forward to see how that changes this semester.