Discussion on 3/29: Convergence of Desires

Dear All,

After your discussion of Exploratory 4 and the vagaries of constructing a relational network of concerns, I know you are in the right mindset for our final discussion next week. I strongly encourage you to remind yourselves of some of your best moments of understanding. Each week (or two) we have grappled with a different framework, and you have grappled with them well! Now, near the end of the term, I am looking for you to demonstrate some mastery over materials and methods, and that's difficult considering the speed at which we had to move through the course.

As promised, I'll share two specific discoveries from Tuesday's discussion that may help you to think about next week's discussion as both a synthesis and an opportunity to raise new questions and concerns.

photo credit: S. McCullough [click to enlarge]

At one point, we discovered that Lisa Arnold's broadening of composition's history involves not just adding a historical dimension to translingual discussions, but rather re-historicizing some of the field's dilemmas as emerging from translingual concerns. This requires a more complex historical positioning than any narrative we currently tell -- especially those narratives that are centered in the dilemma of "how to educate globally without denationalizing," since those narratives are based less in diaspora and political evolution, and more in unidirectional assumptions about citizenship and belonging, and about what languages we have been interested in and why. But re-historicization goes beyond just telling a different narrative. For Arnold, in fact, it extends as far back as one region's emergence from the Ottoman Empire, its consequent sense(s) of "nationalism," and the curricular and administrative decisions that were made as a result of that emergence.

A related question for us to consider: What should our institutional archival work look like if we want/ need to be able observe trends beyond our own?

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At another point, we discovered that Saba Fatima's uptake of "script" made the concept more malleable for rhetoric and composition study, by offering us a way to think about scripts not only as semantic containers, but as units: collections of concepts or ideas related to a particular discursive event. If we know how to look for them, "scripts" are capable of expressing incongruities between whole theories of language. This means we can usefully complicate the knowledges that we typically associate with global rhetorical work -- i.e., diaspora and standpoint -- so as to do more than just essentialize one group in lieu of another. We can also understand what makes our own projects "political" even if they don't explicitly involve politics. By the end of last class, we weren't sure if Fatima's "epistemological nationalism" necessarily included us, but we were aware that she enabled us to look more critically at the associations we embrace and the practices we love in order to see them as nuanced and complex. For example, we might fill in the blanks differently in the following statement:

"Such incidents reinforce the prevalent notion held by many Muslim-Americans that unless our views are in line with current US foreign policy--that is, performing the undying patriotic script--we cannot expect to have any political influence despite having the monetary means to do so" (Fatima 345).

We might use "rhet/comp theorists, literacy organizations, or national conferences" in the first spot, and "attitudes towards language study, attitudes towards foreign study, or national educational policy" in the second spot.

A related question for us to consider: What determines our notions of "what is possible" in the field?, or What drives our epistemology? 

Until Tuesday,
-Dr. Graban