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
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| Photo credits: M. Dykema [click to enlarge] |
