Discussion on 3/22: Defining "Globalization" in Notions of "Africa"

Folks,

Photo credit: S. McCullough [click to enlarge]

Very nice work last class. That was our first of three days dedicated to "defining 'globalization,'" and you may remember we had a fairly complex justification for trying to understand "globalization" through considerations of African philosophy. What struck me time and again during our discussion was how the readings -- Marback's in particular, but also the texts in which he situated his project -- equipped us to notice new commonplaces from which to characterize African rhetoric. For South Africa, you noted these commonplaces in the kind of participatory agency invited by memorial sites and expressions of vulnerability (i.e., Robben Island, commemorative gestures, etc.). For "Africa" more broadly, you noted these commonplaces in the kind of listening practices required to understand what philosophies have traditionally been silenced (i.e., griot performances, sapiential knowledge, etc.).

From our cluster of guiding questions:  

1. Beyond Salazar's "Athens" metaphor, what are the different conceptions of "Africa" that our writers contend with, or that we are being asked to contend with? 
2. What are they hoping we will notice, embrace, or reject? 
3. How does this help us differentiate between contrastive, comparative, cross-cultural, intercultural, transnational, and/or global approaches to studying rhetoric and composition?

we did not fulfill that final question, but we can try to do so next week. In fact, next week I'll ask you all to open the class by sharing the results of your fourth (and final!) exploratory, before launching into our discussion. From there, it might be easier to consider how "nation," "nationalism," "attitude," and "identity" provide another set of factors through which we can both reflect on what we are learning this semester and articulate the global rhetorical uptake in each of our final projects.

Recap of 3/22

As promised, here is a link to Junge's and Johnson's documentary film from last class:

• "Iron Ladies of Liberia" (Junge and Johnson, Just Media Films, 2007) 

In moving towards praxis, we got as far as devising a set of questions inspired by our discussions of rhetorical sovereignty, and then we noticed how that set of questions resonated with the questions posed by Mao, Hesford, and Tuhiwai Smith at the beginning  of the term.

In turn, I offer those questions back to you as a set of attitudes or considerations, what I'm loosely calling our "Transnational Rhetorical (TNR) Approach":

• enables the study of communications outside of an Aristotelian framework (helps us to rethink framework)
• promotes a kind of self-reflexivity of our own reactions to texts (that are, themselves, tied to triggers, stereotypes, and prejudices) and also to their patterns of circulation 
• promotes linkages between local cultures and global problems
• involves learning how to question “development” and “globalization” as a text, an ideology, a movement
• pays attention to how “trans” means “changing the nature of something” and not just “moving through, across, or between”
• recognizes how globalization is uneven by looking at the multiple powers at work in/on a single location (commercial, ethnic, cultural, corporate, etc.)
• sees social and economic issues as intertwined and builds a critical vocabulary based on those things
• tries to avoid cultural hegemonic interpretation (where “hegemony” means one view is seen as naturally dominant over another)
• considers borders as discourses (i.e., ethnic borders, ideological borders), and assumes that borders change
• encourages us to understand “nation” as a discursive construct, and perhaps help us to know what values or ideals we are currently using to define and understand “nation.”
• involves reading the decolonization of a culture through its colonizing rhetorics
• asks how the local/vernacular can help promote models for transnational rhet/comp that might work from the ground up, where “verna” = relationship between the local and the institutional

Let's see where this takes us in the remaining weeks.

 

Preview of 3/29

Our three readings for next week -- Arnold, Fatima, Cooper -- are intentionally diverse. Each of these writers establishes a "critical program" that occurs at the convergence of two or more desires. What are those desires, and how do they resonate with some of our past class discussions about embodiment, history, national identification, and rhetorical sovereignty? And then, what do they contribute to the conversation that perhaps we haven't yet seen?

I'm genuinely looking forward to this,

-Dr. Graban