4/19 Research Network Forum Showcase

And finally, a link to our program.

See you next week,

-Dr. Graban

Closing up the blog ...

Dear All,

As promised, here is a link to the list of questions and approaches we reviewed during Tuesday's class meeting (a stable copy also exists in our course library). As you prepare your RNF presentation for next week, let one or more of these questions or approaches help you to frame how you have negotiated the dual goals of this assignment.

Tomorrow, I will be printing programs for our symposium. If the title you sent me previously is still complete and describes your project, please feel free to let me know that. But do let me know, either way.

As a reminder, I have 17 people confirmed to attend (including the 8 of us), but some of them may leave and arrive at variable times. To be safe, I'd say go ahead and make 17 copies of your handouts, but do accept my apologies in advance if not everyone picks them up.

And finally, please be sensitive to your time frame, rehearse in advance, and plan to deliver the most polished presentation you can. Because we are simulating something like the RNF, I'll ask for professional dress and that you consider a fairly low-context audience (i.e., an audience who may be less familiar with the context of your work and with our course than you would normally assume).

With many thanks and much anticipation and wishes for a productive weekend,
-Dr. Graban

4/5 Wrapup: Comparative Rhetorics Symposium and Looking Forward

Dear All,

As promised, here is a link to the table where we made note of driving forces across the Fall 2013 special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (43.3, guest edited by LuMing Mao). If you'd like me to post your preparation notes to Canvas, feel free to send them to me via e-mail.

We will meet in the classroom next week (April 12) for a communal working session, so please bring any materials you need in order to make headway on your RNF projects. We'll have projection if we need it, and whiteboard space, and I can conduct break-out conferences on an individual basis. (Of course, also feel free to seek me out in office hours or an appointment outside of class.)

There is much work to do in preparation for our RNF Symposium on April 19. We have a small audience committed to attend and offer questions and critical feedback on your projects. In addition, I will send a general invitation to the English listservs next week. To date, we can anticipate an audience of 17 people (including ourselves), so do keep that in mind when it comes to providing copies of any handouts.

I'll design a program for the symposium next week and would appreciate having your full titles as soon as possible. I'm also more than happy to help you brainstorm ways to trim or clarify if you're struggling with titular scope.

Finally, here is the general order of speakers and topics that I circulated to our audience earlier today:

3:35-4:35 (10-minute presentation and 10-minute discussion each participant)

• Andrew Ealum, The Problem of Authenticity in Studies of MesoAmerican Rhetorics
• Ashley Rea, Listening to the Cross-Cultural Archive 
• Stephanie Levitt, Rhetoric, Indigeneity, and Legal Discourse

*** 10-minute break ***

4:45-5:45 (10-minute presentation and 10-minute discussion each participant) 

• Travis Maynard, Re-assembling Assemblage within a Non-Western Framework 
• Sean McCullough, Listening for Rhetorical “Silence” in How Graphic Novels Write Global Conflict 
• Meghan Dykema, Questioning Agency in the Circulation of Non-Western Women’s Rights Activism

5:45-6:05 General Q&A and wrap-up

See you next week!
Dr. Graban

Critics of Global Rhetoric Converging and Diverging in the Sky: A Network of Concerns

Exploratory 4 was not really easier to do than the other exploratory projects, but it was the most helpful for me, because it helped me get a better sense of how to go about tackling the dense texts we have been reading for Global Rhetorics. The critics from our readings (Lisa R. Arnold, Marilyn M. Cooper, and Saba Fatima) did not all have the same goals (diverging), but they were all wrestling with similar global rhetoric concerns (converging).

In our "network of concerns," Meghan Dykema and I identified several topics from the Global Rhetorics course and mapped out how the different critics were pursuing those topics, along with critics from last week: Pal Ahluwalia, Kermit E. Campbell, and Richard C. Marback. For this blogpost, however, I will stick to only talking about this week's critics. Our network map was designed like a 2-D model of what could potentially become a 3-D layout of concerns for global rhetoric. Each concern (represented in cloud bubbles) is broad on the surface, but we added notes to make them more clear. We noticed that certain critics were more concerned with certain topics, so not all the critics connect directly to all the topics. Also, just because two critics may connect to the same topic does not mean that both critics have the same goals in mind for said topic.

For instance, for the "Multilingual/Multiliterate Pedagogies" topic, we had both Arnold and Cooper connecting to the cloud bubble. But because of the note boxes on the lines connecting them to the clouds, we reveal they don't necessarily have the same goals for that topic. Arnold's goal is to look into the historical contexts of how the use of different languages has been incorporated in the past to further learning:

"Armed with a sense that composition has a global and multilingual history, we will better be able to provide writers with the rhetorical tools necessary to gain economic, political, cultural, and social power in the places where they live and work.” (Arnold 296)

Cooper's goal is to show how using multiple languages in the classroom might be a better tool for writing composition in the classroom, and enrich student identities:

“[P]edagogy of multiliteracies . . . requires us to rethink the notion of identity, how it is enacted in language use, and also what teachers of college writing tell students about choosing correct or appropriate languages.” (Cooper 87)

These divergences in specific goals do not, however, stop these two critics from converging in thought. Although Arnold's focus is more on looking into the histories of schools (specifically the Syrian Protestant College, 1866–1902) and their multilingual practices for learning, she also recognizes the importance of multilingual learning, like Cooper:

“‘[D]ifference in language’ might be a ‘resource for producing meaning’ rather than an impediment to it[.]” (Arnold 290)

So, the network map we constructed successfully shows how the two critics are both different and alike at the same time. The specific goals of critics set them apart from each other; otherwise, nothing significantly new would come from their research. However, where they converge shows where the globally rhetorical conversation of multiple critics is forming.

Assembling Epistemic Scripts - Ramblings on Epistemic Script as Cultural Unit

It should be no secret to many of you that I am interested in the concept of assemblage. I don’t necessarily think it is a conceptual cure-all or the panacea for composition; however, I do think it is something that should be circulating wider in the field to help us understand and teach the processes of composing. However, part of why I like assemblage so much is just how versatile it is. Sure, it is a process of composing, where we can explicitly assemble a series of citations or samples to form a new text. But assembly as composing process is only the tip of the iceberg, as we can use assemblage as a framework for composing writ large, where we consider a lot more broadly the kinds of pre-existing materials that we draw upon when we compose: whole texts themselves (as in a canon or syllabus), cultural discursive conventions, the actual physical materials of texts, media, and genre conventions, just to name a few. Any given text is an assemblage that explicitly and implicitly relies on what has come before it. I give this overview for those that weren’t in Dr. Yancey’s Convergence class last semester, but it also serves as a starting premise of this blog post: the idea that assemblage is malleable and can encompass different sizes of textual “units.” And ultimately my project is arguing to add another thread to assemblage theory, showing how it could be viable and valuable in approaches to (teaching) composition that prioritize and emphasize the concept of identity.

I made mention in class that I think Fatima’s idea of an epistemic script could give us a way of thinking about identity as assembled, so I’m going to use this post to try and make some of those early connections. So, first things first: if Assemblage isn’t just about samples or citations of words or small bits of audio, but can include larger and smaller units of meaning, then theoretically an “epistemic script” could be one of those units as well; if that were the case, then we could begin to think about how a person’s identity is comprised of the epistemic scripts they carry, temporarily assembled on the body and in the psyche of an individual. But to connect assemblage and identity in this way, we need a stronger understanding of what constitutes epistemic scripts. Fatima, pulling from Alison Bailey, defines scripts as “a person’s gestures, language, attitudes, concept of personal space, gut reactions to certain phenomena, and body awareness” (342). Of course, the cultures of which we are members shape how we believe and how we speak. But, I do not believe that this is an exhaustive list, as this brief list is primarily concerned with things we internalize from our cultures. Instead, I believe that like assemblage, we can open up epistemic scripts to include scripts that are more external. Opening up the idea and scope of epistemic scripts can put it on similar ground as I placed assemblage above, where we can see individual texts, or certain bits of texts, as performing or representing portions of an individual’s identities.

To try to make this connection a little more concrete, I can point to the network that Sean, Ashley, and I designed for our exploratory--specifically, I want to point to just how messy it was. We had a lot of textual data around the perimeter to show all of the points of identity we saw play out in the texts, but when you look toward the center, to all the lines and arrows, that’s where you see how messy identity is, how all of these factors overlap. We are comprised of multiple identities and they emerge and fade as our contexts dictate. And each one of those identities has been substantiated by different scripts we have internalized--whether through action, attitude, or belief. So, something like the loyalty to America script that Fatima points to could be considered an epistemic script. But what does this loyalty “sound” like? What does it “look” like? What does it “act” like? I can’t speak for the Muslim-American loyalty script, but we can build an image of a prototypical “loyal” american. He (and it is definitely a he) probably distrusts any manufactured good that isn’t made in America while he blasts Creedence out of the open windows of his pre-owned Japanese pick up, not at all sensing the irony resonating between his sentiments and choice of vehicle. Even in this small profile, we have a few different scripts at play: internalized xenophobia, resentment at the downturn of american manufacturing, a pick-up truck (with our without bumper stickers, take your pick), and Creedence. What does liking Creedence tell us about this person? Well, it doesn’t tell us anything definitive about him, but it is one script that he has assembled; maybe a Vietnam vet uncle got him into Creedence; but when taken in consideration with the other scripts at play, we can gain a sense of who this example “is.” Of course, it’s hard to locate something like these far-away scripts within a person, but something as small as “likes Creedence” and “drives pickup truck” can take on meaning when placed with others in order to come to something other Americans can recognize as “loyal.” That tangent aside, scripts also become interesting when we reconsider Arnold’s article as ultimately being a dispute over curricula, in which teachers were in conflict about which scripts to impart to their students; inasmuch school acts as enculturation, the choice of entire texts or attitudes to impart becomes a kind of assembly and a kind of scripting, hoping that students take up the scripts we offer them. Thinking about scripts and assemblage like this makes it a bit nebulous because the borders we can draw around any script or semantic unit is ephemeral and may not be as readily recognized as the function they are serving, but I think scripts may be a way to give us a somewhat identifiable unit of identity and connect assemblage to composition’s overarching concern with identity.

Do We Risk Essentializing Global Rhetorical Study by Looking for Common Concerns?

After talking to other students and reading the blog entries that have been posted already, it seems like I might have been in the minority when I read this exploratory prompt and thought it sounded like the most straightforward of the four. For better or worse, as I’ll get into below, I read “create a network of concerns” and felt I had a pretty solid understanding of what that meant and how to approach the task. For me, it meant identifying some concerns from recent class discussions and looking for ways that the authors took up those concerns (or didn’t), and it also meant trying to find some major concerns within each of the three texts for this week. Thus, I think the framework for this project was a mix of deductive and inductive measures. I definitely approached the readings looking for concerns such as the fallacy of progress and the need to rethink our disciplinary histories, but Andrew and I also tried to let the texts speak back to us as much as possible in revealing their concerns.

As I mentioned above, my reading of the assignment might have been something of a double-edged sword as my mind immediately jumped to attempting to establish relationships between the different texts (i.e., to put them into a conversation or a social network via their connections). For me, that meant looking for commonalities, and thus, our map of broad-ish concepts with more nuanced nodes and overlays was born. Looking back, still think that this was a fairly successful way to approach the task, but it does also lend itself to putting texts in conversation that might not necessarily want to be speaking to each other, which was a question that Dr. Graban brought up during our presentation. As with so many things this semester, it seems, this question made me think of Laurie Gries – specifically, her concern about what texts (written or not, in her case) want us to do with them. By focusing on ways that these texts overlapped in their concerns, were we “speaking for the [texts] about their original intentions” (Gries 92) rather than letting them speak to us entirely? Obviously, we weren’t making claims about the original intentions of primary, ancient texts, but rather about articles that are themselves interpretive, but I do take the question as a caution against reading with too eager an eye for commonalities, as the danger of essentialism is always looming whether we are reading primary or secondary texts.

While any act of interpretation poses this threat, I do believe we have to make some interpretive moves if we are going to attempt to identify some concerns for the field of global rhetorical study. Ultimately, I think this is what our map helps us to do. If we are to claim that there exists a set of concerns that are vital to the study of global rhetorics, then we do have to make the case that they are present in multiple works within the field. Andrew and I mentioned in our presentation that we hesitated over authors who were initially only connected to one concept or concern, and I think this is because we hoped to establish with our map that the concerns we identified are prominent trends, concepts that appear across this field of study and that are significant by nature of their multiple appearances.

Still, we were also cautioned not to “conflate” the goals of these very different readings under the same broad concepts, and this is where I think the multiple layers of our map become important. Andrew suggested adding the additional layer of transparent nodes to help triangulate the more specific concerns of each author, and I think this element helps to situate each text’s goals uniquely within the broader framework of the map. In addition, the clarifying text within each node helps to illustrate how the different authors, each working toward their own distinct goals, still take up or reveal concerns that others address or approach. The “Affect/Embodiment” concern highlights what we hoped this method would accomplish. While we have two authors connected to this concern, Fatima and Marback’s concerns with affect and embodiment take very different forms, both of which contribute to their overall goals. Fatima’s article emphasizes empathy in particular, arguing that it is “the sort of affective response that should inform [Muslim Americans’] political discourse” (347). Marback, meanwhile, recognizes the powerful potential of an affective response in negotiating a turbulent past; by arguing that Robben Island invites visitors to “respond with disgust and shame to a past none would choose to repeat” (48), Marback highlights the power of these emotions in developing a future for South Africa that remains conscious of its recent history. Interestingly, though their overall goals are quite different, Fatima and Marback’s mutual connection to affect and embodiment also shares an emphasis on the relationships between affect and citizenship. Both Fatima and Marback invite readers to consider citizenship as “an embodied activity of being in and moving about in a world filled with other people and many things" (Marback 73), and emphasizing the affective dimension of political participation helps us “makes sense of the ambiguity of our emotions, and also allows us to claim ownership of our citizenship…within that ambiguity” (Fatima 353).

At the end of the day, I’m still torn on the question of whether to emphasize mutual connections or focus on the differences between these and other texts in global rhetorical study. Ultimately, I think our attempt at a nuanced “connections” map was really an attempt at a happy medium between the two. While the risk of flattening out the unique goals of these different projects is a real one, I think we must take that risk in order to establish a set of concepts we can argue as important to global rhetorics. 

Not One over the Other, but One next to Another: Relation-Building through Connection and Disconnection

As our survey of global rhetorical practices and methodologies comes to a close, I cannot help but to think that this last week’s readings have served as the perfect synthesizing focus for our written and oral discussions this semester. As I believe Travis may have noted in class, the notions of nonessentialist identity and translingualism seem to speak to the “goals” of Global Rhetorics. Too often, our desire to understand other cultures and their rhetorics on our own terms wins out over our countervailing intention to practice the form of rhetorical restraint for which Laurie Gries advocates, a restraint that forces us to silence our colonizing interpretations in order to “hear” the buried voices of unfamiliar selves—not to be referred to as illiterate, unintelligible “others.” Thus, we return to harmful binary constructions that pit East against West, First-World nations against Third-world nations, literacy against orality, English against every other language, and self against other.

Accordingly, every thought—spoken or not—every “contribution” to our understanding of global rhetorical practices, epistemologies, and methodologies, has involved cognitive contestation. From our first day of class to this past one, my mind has been at war. Saturated with a Western identity and ideology, how could I ever dismantle my terministic screen, a screen that stimulates my hand to write “Foucault,” “Barthes,” “Derrida,” “Bakhtin,” or “Burke” in the margins of the works we’ve read? Is this not an example of the very interpretive colonization that we’ve been working to circumvent? Are these voices not poised, ready to invade the worlds symbolically constructed by others? Or, does the relegation of these influential voices to the “margins” of the pages enact an apt metaphor for a healthy method of gaining entrance to the discipline of Global Rhetorics? As a scholar, as a writer, I am the product of what I have read. I should not erase my history any more than I should the histories of the unfamiliar selves from whom I wish to learn. However, the validation of my history, my voice in this context, does not relinquish me of the responsibility I have to place myself in uncomfortable situations, to embrace unfamiliarity, and to make associations when appropriate while at the same time being unafraid to make healthy dissociations, too.

Thus, in the construction of our network of global rhetorical concerns, Ashley, Travis and I very quickly recognized the need to mitigate our collective desire to privilege connections over disconnections. As scholars of Global Rhetorics, we want to make connections, between ourselves and our practices and the selves and practices of rhetors from other spatio-temporal situations, and this desire is not mal-intentioned, albeit it does not account for productive disconnections that can be made. I believe it was this balancing act that made the construction of our network so difficult at first. In our initial attempts, we had drawn inflexible connections between bifurcated concepts, like “nation-state and community” and “national identity and cultural identity.” These connections inhibited us from creating the robust network that we know Global Rhetorics demands. These binaries betrayed a hierarchy that did not allow us to consider how other concepts and themes related to these ones. In order to complete the assignment, then, we had to start over and determine some overarching concerns that we recognized in each reading (implicitly or explicitly) and branch out from there.

As globalization has become more prevalent, we noticed that issues of identity and language seemed to be the biggest concerns. Globalization often imposes an essentializing script—on difference in both identity politics and language. The construction of nonessentialist selves, though, occurs through conceptualization of the self and identity politics as predicated upon complex matrices of relation, and it was this conceptualization of the self that seemed to inform our complex network of relations that we constructed for Global Rhetorics. Levinas asserts that “the self is constructed not in opposition to the other, as in the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, but rather is grounded in responsibility for the other” (qtd. in Cooper 91). Constructing a network that follows from Hegelian dialectics inhibits generative global study of rhetorics. For example, in her essay “Muslim-American Scripts,” Saba Fatima substantiates responsibility to others as essential for the formation of nonessential identities in her excoriation of the “subconscious desire” for Muslim-Americans “to disconnect [them]selves from complicity in the consequences of sanctions imposed by the United States against ‘our own,’” claiming that “[b]y not being politically active, [Muslim-Americans] distance [them]selves from policy decisions that affect Muslims around the world, thus keeping in abeyance any feelings of responsibility” (Fatima 345). By “shirking” their responsibility to contest unhealthy generalizations of Muslims across the world, Muslim-Americans allow xenophobic, myopic voices to determine their identities for them. Historically, these conceptions of relation and responsibility have been oppressed and even repressed by identity politics that always position one entity—in this case, political and news media in the United States—over another, never next to another.

In our network, then, we wanted to show a complex relation of “selves,” the concepts and themes, operating next to one another, in a form of responsibility to one another. However, as we started drafting, we noticed that we needed to become more cognizant of the ontology of the connections we sought to make. For the most part, globalization has enticed scholars to define connection through a Burkean negativism: connection is connection because it shall not be disconnection. We make connections because we see disconnections, but this can be problematic for a multitude of reasons, two of which being that this reason for connection often erases difference and prioritizes dominant discursive scripts. A more significant reason is that it limits our understanding of connection. For one, we do not understand what connection actually means apart from disconnection, but we also impose upon connection a flat definition. Are all connections the same? Are there not multiple types of connections?

When constructing our network, then, we were forced to consider how we would connect each node. At first, we used arrows which linked one node to another, but some of our nodes seemed to resist this form of one-sided connection. We then tried connections between nodes with arrows going both ways, but it became difficult to determine how much give-and-take actually took place between the nodes. We also tried constructing lines which denoted connections across nodes, but it seemed as if certain nodes became less important in these connections, acting only as waypoints between “more significant” nodes. In a sense, our terms enacted a form of resistance to connection, to identification, that we had not anticipated in the slightest. However, this was a healthy resistance as Cooper notes that identity politics should not be “seen as a process of control,” but “as resisting control” (93). Thus, our mapping allowed us to see that connections cannot often be subjected to control. By noticing how certain nodes resisted connection to, between, or across other nodes, we could be more mindful about the connections we made—and the disconnections we made, too. For instance, in placing nodes next to one another, the impulse was always to make a connection between them, but we also began to consider what could be said in “making” a disconnection between two related nodes.

For example, Lisa Arnold’s explanation of the SPC faculty members’ decision to provide “students with consistent instruction in English” as a means of granting students “direct ‘access…to nearly all that is valuable both old and new’” (284) highlights the connections and disconnections we forged between our two overarching concepts. While language grants access to certain communicators, it may not always foster Cooper’s idealized identity politics that stem from relation-building and responsibility to and for others. Thus, our “language” node could connect across “access” and “community,” but it could not connect to or across “relational” or “responsive.” Language certainly plays a role in identity construction, but English is often characterized as a language which functions on a dominant discursive script of erasure and essentialism. As Arnold argues, instruction of and in English can, though, lead to a different form of community identity formation that is not always plagued by homogenizing monlingualism, for, “[w]hile languages inevitably carry with them the traces of their originating cultures, they are at the same time flexible enough to accommodate new ideas, values, and beliefs” (286).

As globalization continues to occur, we cannot let our desire to make connections inhibit healthy disconnections. While the introduction of the English language to foreign cultures expands networks of communication, it does not and cannot erase distance, space. As we continue to explore the rhetoric of nations, cultures, and peoples across the globe, we must keep in mind Arnold’s assertion that English functions differently as it enters and exits various cultural, communal, and national spaces. No two Englishes are perfectly translatable. Understanding this will help us to move toward a knowledge and practice of rhetoric that does not lead to essentialist identity politics and erasure of literacy practices.