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.