Do Not Use Indigeneity as a Tool of Separation, and Try Not to Inadvertently Misrepresent Liberia

A Relationship of the Minds

Leymah Gbowee’s Nobel lecture presented an opportunity to look into the world from a Liberian standpoint. The more we dive into the discourse of different cultures, the more I see this disconnect that occurs between “outsiders” and the cultures they are looking into. The concept of indigeneity is so broad. It implies that a culture is felt the same way by all people within that culture. But culture can be expressed in many different ways. For instance, when looking up key terms within the text of Gbowee’s speech, it was obvious the Internet was filled with so many sources attempting to convey a message behind every term that it was hard to choose hyperlinks to link to each term.

If I wanted to talk about Liberia as a country, I could go to the official Liberian government’s site to gain information [ http://www.emansion.gov.lr/ ] or the Liberia Wikipedia page [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberia ] or a seemingly endless number of links that showed up from a simple Google search. The thing I could not do was be a citizen of Liberia from birth, because I already exist as a U.S. citizen by birth. So, this complicated things tremendously. But it cannot stop there, because all those links from Google came from different places, they could not possibly be 100% connected to each other. They are separate. To take it one step further, I rely on a hypothetical.

Say, in a perfect world, every link about Liberia had to come from a Liberian writer or else it would never be accepted as a credible source about Liberia, and Google would not allow any links from “outside” writers to surface on the Internet. In such a world, would every writer have the same experiences as all the other writers? Absolutely not. It is impossible, even in that “perfect” world, because there is one thing that keeps every human from completely understanding every other human: a disconnection of the minds.

What then is this indigeneity? Does it actually exist? No and yes. It does not exist in its implication of “sameness” throughout the peoples of one culture or place. But indigeneity does exist if it is considered a relationship between several people of one culture or place.

Indigeneity and Liberia

So, I argue that indigeneity is a product of relationships between people in a culture or place. If you move those people to a different place—together—they still form a community of ideals. If you take over their lands, they still have each other. I do not want to focus on how colonization uses the concept of indigeneity to create “others” out of the colonized, but rather focus on how indigeneity can be used by people of a certain culture or place to build a community that supports each other. That form of indigeneity is positive, because it comes from the communities that have made themselves a community based of the place they have lived in or formed their culture in. The other form is created by the “outsiders”—the ones that use indigeneity as a tool of separation, furthering the disconnection of the minds.

In Chapter 7 of Rhetorics of the Americas (Baca & Villanueva), “Rhetoric and Resistence in Hawai’i: How Silenced Voices Speak Out in Colonial Contexts”, Georganne Nordstrom wrote:

Since history is most often written by the victor, the experiences of indigenous peoples and other marginalized ethnic groups in colonized locations are frequently portrayed in such a way so as to cast the colonizer in a specific favorable light and downplay oppressive practices. (Nordstrom 117)

Nordstrom’s words show us how indigeneity can be used by colonizers to manipulate a culture by leaving facts out or creating descriptions of indigenous peoples that do not stand in truth. How this relates to Exploratory 3 is how Ashley, Stephanie, and I chose our sources to link to different terms in Leymah Gbowee’s Nobel Prize speech. Being “outsiders”, we were determining which sources to use to build the context of the speech, and even though we were trying our best to find sources to create the context of the speech, that was the problem: We were creating the context, and we were leaving some things out and choosing what we thought was important in terms of context. Even though our goal was not to marginalize any sources nor to misrepresent the Liberian culture, it was inevitable; we could not help it, because there are too many factors going into what should be used as a source or not be used as a source, and because we are not even a part of the Liberian culture, we are not responsible for representing that culture.

All we could do is try to understand the context of the speech by looking at sources on our own, which is fine. But once we decided to pick certain sources for terms, we were inadvertently attempting to represent the culture based on our own perceptions and understandings. I even added some songs to coincide with certain abstract ideals in the speech (i.e. “’…peace, social justice and equality.’ [“Wonderful Everyday”] [Lyrics] [Original]”), which was an attempt by me to help guide any readers towards showing empathy for the struggles of the Liberian women (and other people) Gbowee mentions in her speech, but the songs were not really directly related to the speech. So, I was creating something that was coming from my own perception of their struggles. The song at the end of our contextualization (“[ ( : VIDEO : ) ]”), however, is a more proper representation of the struggles of West African women (and other West African people), but only in its own context. In the context of our contextualization, the song became what we thought properly represented the West Africans’ struggles.

Insights

When reading anything, especially something written from the perspective of someone from a culture outside of your own, it is important to remember you cannot fully represent another person’s thoughts or culture based on your own research, but you can try to take in your own understanding of their text/discourse/rhetoric to bring it some importance to your own life, which is a positive way to listen to a culture instead of speaking for it. Having said that, I believe our Exploratory’s contextualization can be useful as we remember it is only one way to look at the culture of Liberia through Gbowee’s speech. The speech itself is another way to see her struggles and the struggles of West African women and women (and other people) of other countries she mentioned in her speech. But the possibilities for representation are endless, and no single representation should be used as a model of what Liberian culture (or any other culture) is or is not.

Subject Position(s): Rejecting Rhetorical Manipulation and Delimited Situation

In the title track to their “coming-of-age” album Futures, Jim Adkins of popular American alternative rock band Jimmy Eat World repeats, “Hey now, the past is told by those who win.” To the victor go the spoils, and apparently a large portion of those spoils include the ability to write off the histories of the oppression of other ethnic groups and cultures as subsidiary and inconsequential. They simply do not fit the tale of progress that Western civilizations have worked so hard to write. However, Georganne Nordstrom describes the creation of this reductive narrative as a form of rhetorical manipulation that seeks to elide difference and dissidence to position colonization as a form of salvation from a lack of civilization. “Such rhetorical manipulation of the historical record in mainstream Western discourse,” Nordstrom writes, “has resulted in the production of a specific picture of Native Hawaiians and the immigrant laborers brought in to work the plantations as passive, content, and welcoming of the civilizing agenda of the benevolent colonizers” (117). The rhetorical manipulation imposed by the “victors,” then, downplays the counter-narrative of struggle that underscores most perpetuated stories of progress.

When Meghan and I went about constructing our visualized discourse analysis of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, we found it relatively easy to deconstruct the speech based upon the heuristic presented on the blog (Transtextual, Contextual, Intratextual), but we could not so easily discern indigeneity emerging from this analytical paradigm. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “indigenous” originated in the mid-17^th century and comes from the Latin “indigena,” which translates to “a native.” Thus, for us, indigeneity came to naturally entail struggle, diaspora, and oppression as natives across the globe have been historically marginalized in their own lands, languages, and cultural practices.

In Sirleaf’s speech, we noticed moments when Sirleaf would directly address or position herself as speaking on behalf of her fellow Liberians; however, this practice did not necessarily alert us to presences or absences of indigeneity, largely due in part to the nature of the speech itself. As discussed in class this week, the Nobel Prize—even the acceptance speech itself—seemed to function as an ideology product, making the speech and the whole event seem staged, scripted and performative, a disingenuous narrative part of the larger disingenuous whole narrative of peace and progress.

However, like all progress narratives, there was an underlying tale of struggle—of displacement, of subversion—that we were able to bring back to the surface when we applied a different lens through which to analyze Sirleaf’s discourse. This lens, one of subject position as defined by Jacqueline Jones Royster in “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own,” allowed us to notice Sirleaf’s indigeneity in her refusal to stay still, to occupy one position on the stage and to address one audience. “Using subject position as a terministic screen in cross-boundary discourse,” according to Royster, “permits analysis to operate kaleidoscopically, thereby permitting interpretation to be richly informed by the converging of dialectical perspectives” (29).

Using subject position as our analytical framework for “mining” for moments of indigeneity as they appeared in Sirleaf’s speech, then, we were able to notice subtle disruptions to the narrative of progress that ideology products attempt to impose upon international instances of war and peace and, consequently, indigeneity. For example, Sirleaf pushes back against the traditional meanings associated with the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Laureate, positioning herself and the award as a symbolic reflection of peace, but not in the way that one might wish for her to. She does not simply reflect peace. She reflects the struggle for peace.

The award, then, has not been given to Sirleaf, but to all of Liberia, Yemen, Africa, and anyone across the globe who is struggling for peace. The award, which usually symbolizes what has been accomplished and—particularly—what has been accomplished by one individual, as a result of Sirleaf’s subversive subject position, symbolizes what still needs accomplishing. Sirleaf and her fellow recipients are not static characters in the plot of a Western narrative of progress. The story is not finished; Sirleaf’s story is not finished. Peace has not yet come to Liberia, to Yemen, or to Africa, and no award can make that happen.

Furthermore, the two other positions that Sirleaf occupies on the very restricting stage of the Nobel Prize lecture subtly subvert the nature of the event itself, as she invokes the past recipients of the award as a lineage to herself as a recipient and enacts a form of Burkean identification with women across the world who are struggling for peace. In both positions, Sirleaf claims for herself a different history, a different narrative. She writes a history that does not delimit conflicts and progress, but instead extends the stationary staged event beyond its physical location.

Moreover, it is not just Sirleaf’s inability to stay still that evokes her indigeneity, but it is also her inability to be delimited or situated, by the constraints of the event and the ideology product of the Prize itself. Maps do not offer accurate representations of Earth’s lands not only because they cannot achieve perfectly correct proportions, but also because they draw such neat lines of demarcation between locations. Western progress narratives have painted indigenous peoples as accepting of these enforced boundaries, but, again, these narratives elide competing narratives of subversion and contestation that are much more emblematic of indigeneity. As Sirleaf occupies her three main positions, then, she changes her language—the audience she addresses and her use of figurative language.

Furthermore, as Meghan and Mikaela have pointed out, Sirleaf also plays a lot with the chronology of her speech, referring to past, present, and future in “non-Western” ways. To that point, in many Postcolonial works of literature, narratives are often told “a-chronologically,” with less attention to the placing of events and more attention to the events themselves, sometimes the repetition of these events to give them more emphasis and to force readers to keep re-seeing them in new lights.

Sirleaf addresses her past, Liberia’s past, and the history of the Nobel Peace Prize, but she does not do so to focus on what has been accomplished. She does so, instead, to argue for what we might call continuous improvement—in Liberia, Yemen, all of Africa, and everywhere. In doing so, she rejects the narrative of progress that ideology products attempt to impose on indigenous cultures, narratives which say, “You’ve made it! Now, we’re going to ‘save’ another country!” Sirleaf rejects the Nobel Prize’s final period, replacing it with a comma, a breath that sets up a continuation to the narrative.

Now, this might not be what Sirleaf intended at all. Our lens of subject position may not have provided the correct framework to analyze Sirleaf’s discourse. However, I think Royster’s “kaleidoscopic” framework allowed us to “visualize” Sirleaf’s discourse within a healthy contact zone, a discursive space not defined by the drawing of borders themselves (especially given the multiple positions she occupies on stage), but by the recognition of the collision of borders and boundaries that not only calls them into question, but sees them as transmutable and transportable.

If we were to go back and do this assignment over, I would push heavily to provide something similar to what Ashley, Andrew, and Stephanie did. Our approach privileged multiplicity in subject position, so it’s ironic that we offered only one map. I liked being able to see multiple representations, multiple schemes of delimitation that challenged the codified, Western narratives of definition, demarcation, and progress. Like our visualization, their approach may not have been correct, but they achieved a level of thoroughness that we did not in their extremely hybridized approach. Data can be mined and visualized in so many ways. Thus, it is important to not just present one projection of the data and, consequently, position it as the only projection of data.

Sirleaf's Subjectivity: Analyzing Position through Discourse

In analyzing Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's Nobel speech, Sean and I elected to use the provided discourse analysis categories (transtextual, contextual, intratextual) as a deductive scheme, but with the added dimension of subject position analysis offered by Jacqueline Jones Royster. Interestingly, even though we approached the analysis differently than Travis and Mikaela, our two groups ended up with some very similar results, suggesting the significance of subject position - what Travis refers to as "identity spaces" in his post - and audience invocation in Sirleaf's speech.

Royster's subject position analysis was one of the first things that came to mind as I read Sirleaf's speech. Royster argues that in analyzing subjectivity, "lenses include the process, results, and impact of negotiating identity, establishing authority, developing strategies for action, carrying forth intent with a particular type of agency, and being compelled by external factors and internal sensibilities to adjust belief and action (or not)" (1117). These lenses reveal much about Sirleaf's speech and the negotiations of identity and agency within it.

In invoking and addressing multiple audiences, Sirleaf identifies herself from multiple standpoints - woman, African, Liberian, Nobel award winner - and speaks across these subject positions to emphasize both Liberia's local needs for continued democratic progress and the status of women worldwide. Sean and I noted Sirleaf's repeated strategy of invoking histories to mark these identities, from her opening statements positioning herself as a "successor to the several sons and one daughter of Africa who have stood on this stage" to her discussion of her own "lifetime journey to Oslo." It is in this latter section, as Mikaela also pointed out in her blog post, that Sirleaf seems to employ her most concrete expression of indigeneity. By connecting her service work to the teachings of her parents and grandmothers, Sirleaf situates her political career and her Nobel prize within a particularly Liberian set of values. In doing so, she asserts Liberia's agency to speak and be heard for its accomplishments.

This type of positioning is key for Royster, who uses the example of the African American community to point out ways that marginalized groups "[have] seen and [continue] to see [their] contributions and achievements called into question" (1119). She claims that subjectivity analysis allows us to more deeply consider the power structures that determine who has the "authority to speak and to make meaning" (1119). Considered through this lens, Sirleaf's attention to Liberia's future rather than its past of conflict suggests that she is utilizing her moment of authority to speak to Liberia (as she addresses the Liberian people directly) and to help make a new global image of her country. As much time as Sirleaf spends invoking histories in her speech, she does not linger on Liberia's history. While one could argue that this represents a lack of indigenous expression on her part, in my reading, it is an expression of the Liberian identity that needs to be represented on a global scale.


Royster, Jacqueline Jones. "When the First Voice You Hear is not Your Own." The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009. 1117-1127. Print. 

Mapping Indigeneity: On the Difficulty of Engaging in Cross-Cultural Dialogue

            

          As per the usual, my understanding of my group’s exploratory has changed after our class discussion. While composing the map, my group was excited. The intertextual, contextual, and transtextual framework seemed relatively straightforward, and we envisioned a layered map that readers could navigate through in different ways. However, it was during our class when I realized that we never used the map to argue for the presence of indigeneity in Gbowee’s Nobel lecture. Presumably noting the speaker’s indigeneity is not sufficient, but how could we truly delve into Gbowee’s transtextual influences as outside readers? We noted several more obvious or explicit references to the Bible, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the women of the Congo, but how many more did we miss?

            The intertextual mapping was the most straightforward. Using frequency as our metric and basing our map on several of the examples provided us a way to enter into the text and create an inductive theoretical framework for reading Gbowee’s key concepts and themes. Reflecting on these sections now, we could make an argument for the indigeneity of Gbowee’s speech based on her key concepts. As Stephanie notes in her blog post, “I believe Ms. Gbowee was attempting to, by combining the discourse communities of (1) women; and (2) those working toward nonviolent resistance in the face of atrocious violence, was calling her sisters to create a new global, inter-culture discourse community.” Gbowee was addressing concerns from a position of indigeneity, but she was also trying to move towards coalition building across nations and discourse communities.

            Our contextual map was intended to serve multiple purposes. On one hand, the video of the speech would allow viewers to gain a sense of the immediate context surrounding the document, noting the differences in intonation, volume, and inflection that a print document simply lacks. The video, with its visual and oral components, has semiotic meaning beyond the text of the speech. Next, we wanted to contexualize the speech for our (presumably Western) audience. The hypertext speech includes both links to the organizations, events, and so on that Gbowee mentions and similar concepts within contemporary Western media. This map serves to increase a reader’s understanding of the text, but also make the reader more aware of the conflicting ideas and conflict that he or she brings into any reading. For this reason, some of our links are more closely tied to circulation.

            Discourse circulates, of that I’m certain. Ideas don’t exist within a vacuum, but are rather informed by contexts and ideologies.  And yet these ideologies and influences are incredibly difficult to map. (Unless you’re using the hyperbolized and sensationalized rhetoric of say, Donald Trump, as an example. His ideological influences are far more explicit.) We experienced this difficulty of mapping in our transtextual map—to a certain extent, we weren’t able to precisely pinpoint what had influenced Gbowee, and so we settled for an overview of historical conflict in Liberia that Gbowee was certainly responding to. How do we meaningfully engage across differences in a world shaped by colonialism? Are we able to be “together-in-difference” as Mao advocates for, or is the most we can do simply acknowledge our own transtextual influences and, as Royster argues, learn to become better listeners? 

Charting Relationships Between Text and Analysis, Indigieneity and Power

As noted in class, I found this task somewhat difficult, but perhaps it was unnecessarily so. Thinking we had to generate up our own categories, Mikaela and I worked much more inductively in our analysis, allowing Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s Nobel lecture to guide our reading. As a result we came up with somewhat general rhetorical categories that fell on a spectrum of concrete to abstract. We saw the idea of identity as being the most abstract since it connects Sirleaf to broad categories of individuals and gets us far beyond the immediate context of the Nobel Lecture. The most concrete category had to do with intratextual details of rhetorical devices; by focusing on the speech itself, we were trying to remain only within the parameters of the speech with this category. Finally, in the “middle,” were audiences; this category joins the speech with identities, as her repeated invocations of different audiences show how the speech is working within multiple identity spaces. With these three categories in mind, we speculated how the different audiences and identities were related to Sirleaf’s expression of indigineity.

With the opportunity to redo the assignment, I would definitely stick to the traditional categories of discourse analysis: transtextual, contextual, and intratextual. These at least provide a deductive scheme that could be a little more rigid, but I think we also have to recognize that there is some slippage in any type of categorization. What made our analysis of the speech difficult is that while we were trying to illustrate abstract categories, we had to rely on concrete information from the speech. I mean, that’s the nature of analysis, but I think since we already had the sense were on shaky ground with our categories, this leap from concrete to abstract became more apparent in this exercise. Making transtextual claims based on intratextual evidence requires us to do some research and make assumptions about what a text is doing, so there was a lot of second guessing of our generation of categories and subsequent analysis.

Our visualization suggests that while Sirleaf expressed her indigeneity in some regards, she also ventured away from it. Inasmuch as indigeneity is connected to one’s experience or expression of being “native,” Sirleaf’s speech seems much more concerned with using minimal expressions of indigeneity and elevating them to concerns for women, concerns for the continent of Africa, and concerns for human rights everywhere. Thus, it was somewhat difficult to find indigeneity in a text that minimizes it. However, I recognize that is more than likely a constraint of the genre. The acceptance of a Nobel is a ceremony with a lot of pomp and circumstance, so you wouldn’t necessarily expect there to be heavy expression of indigeneity given the context. In fact, I think it would be quite the remarkable deviation if someone made indigeneity the focal point of their acceptance. However, this raises a question for me about the relationship between indigeneity, location, and authenticity. On the one hand, we can frame the question in terms of genre “how indigenous can a nobel lecture be?” Not very. But we might also frame this question in terms of indigeneity: “how indigenous can you be while in Sweden accepting the Nobel prize?” And there can varying degrees in the situation, but I want to suggest that one answer might also be “not very.” Perhaps my point here isn’t exactly clear, so let me try to rephrase: If you’re winning a Nobel Prize, you’ve been vetted by powerful people, probably even becoming a member of the elite yourself. As such, you might be getting further away from “indigeneity” as it relates to colonialism. We often frame indigeneity as being on the disadvantaged end of a power structure, so becoming a Nobel laureate works against that conception. That isn’t to devalue Sirleaf’s contributions or acceptance as much as question the nature of the relationship between indigeneity and power, and the necessary collusion with power to subsequently empower indigenous peoples.

"Togetherness-in-Difference": Nonviolent Women in Turbulent Nations

                In retrospect, and though we did not explicitly discuss this while creating our maps, I believe Andrew, Ashley, and I saw Leymah Gbowee's 2011 Nobel Lecture as an example of the creation of a new community similar to that of the Chinese American rhetoric community contemplated by Mao in his "Rhetorical Borderlands: Chinese American Rhetoric in the Making" (the Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie preface, as noted by Meaghan). By expounding on her own indigenous community in Liberia, I believe that Ms. Gbowee, in her speech, took some steps toward creating a broader, new type of community: that of women actively working toward peace in their troubled countries.

                After reading her speech, the first theme I could think of was: "women!" This made me want to engage further by determining word usage and frequency. As you can see on our first map, the biggest "circle" (the bigger the circle, the more frequently the word is used) was the word "woman" or women" - used a total of 47 times.

                The next most used word was "world," used a total of 13 times.

                Ms. Gbowee also spent a good amount of time combining these two themes - "women" and "world", noting, with pride,  other female communities actively involved in nonviolent resistance within their home countries, including Women of Zimbabwe Arise, the Women of Congo, Women of Acholi Land in Uganda, and Women of Afghanistan.

                I believe Ms. Gbowee was attempting to, by combining the discourse communities of (1) women; and (2) those working toward nonviolent resistance in the face of atrocious violence, was calling her sisters to create a new global, inter-culture discourse community.

                I believe this is similar in theory to Mao's conceptualization of "togetherness-in-difference" which works to create Chinese American rhetoric. (Mao 434). The differences of these women is striking. Women from Uganda, from Congo, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan - they all have different cultures, different languages; they all face different challenges. As noted in Ms. Gbowee's speech, in Zimbabwe, violence includes "arrest and torture," whereas in Afghanistan, violence is "honor killing" and in Congo, violence is of a sexual nature. These differences in definitions should not draw the community of women for nonviolence apart, however - it should, like indirectness and indirectness, as instructed by Mao and other rhetors familiar with Chinese thought, be seen not as polar opposites but rather as complementary to one another. (Mao 444).

                Further, I believe Ms. Gbowee was encouraging the type of speech and actions taken by these women - strong actions, but actions of nonviolence. "Peace" was a major theme of Ms. Gbowee's speech, as she used that word ten times; justice and equality were also used often (five and four times, respectively).

                However, as Young did in "Reading Hawai'is's Asian American Literacy Narratives," Ms. Gbowee noted that the method of communication of these women warriors was often misunderstood, judged, or looked down upon. She noted that the women of Liberia chose "non-violence" over violence, noting that "the use of violence was taking us and our beloved country deeper into the abyss of pains, death, and destruction." She points out that she and the other women "succeeded when no one thought we would."

                Similarly, the minorities in Hawai'i were often judged, looked down upon, and scoffed at for their use of Pidgin. (Young 135). Like Young, Ms. Gbowee encourages women to continue using their own language of nonviolence and to take pride in it, rather than to submit to the belief that nonviolence is inferior. As a community, Ms. Gbowee believes that women can continue to work together to bring peace to their nations, and, eventually, globally.

Addressing Indigeneity

Indigeneity is a multilayered identification structure that consists of innumerable cultural particularities that can neither be convincingly replicated nor completely explained. Reading this speech forced me to consider the effects and consequences of maintaining indigeneity in a foreign environment that demands a certain type of performance. When Ellen Johnson took the stage in Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize she shared the stage with two other women. Her performance then was highlighted by their presence and considered in terms of their cultures and personas as well as hers. Contrast then, is perhaps more powerful than inherent attribute; all critical moments are defined by their setting and the physical factors therein.

I struggled to find a solid way to organize this speech and break it down into categories that appropriately portrayed Johnson’s portrayal of indigeneity. However the more I considered it the more I realized that, because of her physical and contextual location, Johnson was unable to act with full indigenous agency. With this realization it became possible to create categories by which to analyze this speech. We settled on three categories: identity, audience, and language. Identity was one of the most poignant categories because there were so many different identities at work within the narrative. Johnson repeatedly draws attention to the groups she claims allegiance as a means by which to claim some of the indigeneity that the setting and occasion strip her of. She invokes the memory of women who have accepted this award before her in a twofold effort to show alliance and demonstrate solidarity, “The enduring spirit of the great women whose work transcended gender and geographical boundaries is in this room with us…these our forebears, these women who are Nobel Peace Laureates, challenge us to redouble our efforts in the relentless pursuit of peace” (Johnson). By appealing to the collective group of women who have won the award previously, Johnson locates herself within a community that is recognized, but not included in Western Academia. In his chapter, Reading Hawaii’s Asian American Literacy Narratives Young emphasizes the impact language can have on race and group inclusion. “Literacy and race become so intertwined that there are material consequences despite rhetoric on the contrary” (Young 140).

The most palpable tactic Johnson uses to identify with or disassociate from can be defined as “address”. I was acutely interested in analyzing the way Johnson chose to address her audience because of the implicit identity consequences. In the opening lines of the speech Johnson addresses each group in, “Your Majesties, Royal Highnesses, Excellencies, Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Nobel Laureates, my brothers and sisters:” (Johnson). Immediately there is a separation of the audience into the familiar and the foreign. The formality of “Your Majesties, Royal Highnesses, Excellencies, Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee”, stands in staunch comparison with the familiar “brothers and sisters”. Before she does anything else Johnsons takes care to show which groups she is apart of and which she is a guest of. In doing so she attempts to preserve some of her damaged indigeneity. This pattern of address is present throughout the speech, serving as a reminder of the divisional nature of this setting. If Johnson were to deliver this speech in her native Liberia she could make certain assumptions about its reception based on knowledge of her people. Georganne Nordstrom explains this phenomenon in terms of the native Hawaiian people, “By identifying with her subjects as a Hawaiian monarch, Liliuokalani could rely on her people to assume several things…Thus by her very position, her moral character was established with her people” (Nordstrom 127).

The common factor in both of the previously stated categories has been language. Language is the mechanism by which all else is made possible. Johnson is careful to use very formal language, as is the accepted style for this this genre. Conversely, Johnson mirrors this formality with punctuated informal addresses to her “brothers and sisters”, the other Africans in the room and at large (Johnson). Though this speech follows all of the appropriated formatting standards of Nobel laureate acceptance speeches, it has an element of explanation. Johnson betrays awareness that by the accepting the award she sacrifices, at least temporarily, some of her indigenous agency. In an attempt to retain it she intertwines her speech with instances of autobiographical anecdotes, "Mine has been a long journey, a lifetime journey to Oslo. It was shaped by the values of my parents and by my two grandmothers – indigenous Liberians, farmers and market traders – neither of whom could read or write. They taught me that only through service is one’s life truly blessed" (Johnson). These narratives are an attempt to reintegrate her indigenous Liberian experience into the formal Western structure of the speech. Thus the speech is largely a multifaceted performance of indigeneity that falls short of an authentic indigenous experience. It is nearly impossible to represent indigeneity authentically because the performative nature of the presentation detracts from the authentic agency it may have had.

There is a political connotation to literacy and performative language, Nordstrom quotes Kenneth Burke saying, “all literary acts embody attitudes, of resignation, solace, vengeance, expectancy… and thus works of poetry are to be considered symbolic action” (Burke qtd in Nordstrom 123). With this in mind I believe that, though Johnsons speech lacks certain indigenous elements it was doomed to this shortcoming by its very nature as a speech, especially as a speech constructed for and delivered in a foreign local with foreign customs and literary techniques.

Discussion on 2/23: Looking through Ideology Products

Dear All,

Whereas last week we looked for implicit decolonialist (or postcolonial) agendas in what we read, this week I think your tracing of "ideology products" helped us to realize some affordances, limitations, and skepticisms guiding this work. I see each project as uniquely complex, and I appreciate what you drew from them:

Young -- bringing together immigration, Pidgin (as an artifact of occupational roles), and curricular segregation. In narrating his own literacy experiences, Young tries to promote a model for "citizenship literacy" or "cultural citizenship" (7), ultimately showing us two things. First, there is agency in the position of "becoming minor," given what "deterritorializ[ing] dominant discourses" about foreignness and belonging (8) can reveal about Asian-Americans' struggle to deal with racist legacies in Hawaii. Second, this same kind of deterritorialization can enable a re/visioning of the American Story by "offering alternatives that continue to uphold the idea of America" (109). For Young, "becoming minor" means getting caught up in the narrative of progress (178).

Nordstrom -- presenting colonization as a monolithic "enterprise" helps us know where to look for rhetorical resistances, i.e., in Pidgin and kaona, and other "context-specific rhetorical strategies" (118) that resist silencing. The monolithic enterprise doesn't only occur through silencing "indigenous" performances such as storytelling; it also occurs through silencing various justifications for using or not using Pidgin. Ultimately Nordstrom presents "rhetoric" as a history-rewriting tool (138).

Shome -- offering postcolonialism as a critical perspective or critical turn, rather than a standpoint or a genre or a kind of discursive realism (i.e., "first" and "third" world exist in each other, so it makes little sense to set up monoliths like "first-world/third-world"). How can/do/should we expand the canon without appropriating other voices (46), where "voices" include texts, primary documents, discursive practices, and even whole traditions? Aside from raising our own (and our students') awareness of the gender and race politics in the texts that we and they cite, what is the aim of feminist postcolonial rhetorical theory?

Upon Reflection: Memory and Learning
Across all of these texts, when we consider the role of memory and learning, we can begin to raise new questions:

• For Young, memory work is part of what puts together our narratives, but does the same expectation of memory work undergird Nordstrom's discussion, or does her discussion rely more on cultural dissociations than on cultural associations? And how can/do/should we even teach this if we are not also among the disassociated?
• For Shome, "unlearning" doesn't always mean "getting rid of" but it could mean "staying open to critique." What, then, becomes our methodology? Of what can or should our postcolonial analysis of texts reasonably consist?
• Is language always (or necessarily) discursive power in these postcolonial projects?
• Does citizenship revision always (or necessarily) rely on the institutionalization of literacy practices?
• How can we see discourse as a multilayered place for citizenship revision?
• How can an entire field achieve more academic self-reflexivity?
• Why aren't we all taking this class? :) (Borrowed this from some of you ... )

What's Next?
Next week I think we'll be ready to revisit this framework from our discussion of Mao, Hesford, and Tuhiwai Smith on the first day of class. In the remaining units of our syllabus -- Reconfiguring Feminist Paradigms and Defining Globalization -- you can expect we will take this up anew and try to articulate what we think a "global rhetorical" methodology can accomplish (or cannot accomplish).

Very looking forward to it,
-Dr. Graban

Photo credits: M. Dykema [click to enlarge]