Head on over to Tanya's place at SecuringaSpace so you can see what she has in store for us tomorrow in 601.
She has some engaging questions that will keep us going and posted the CFP for the conference that inspired and solicited the _Rhetoric and Ethnicity_ volume. I've hopped around on the blogs, and I see Laurie is on a roll on her 601 project--she has posted some really useful notes on her Independent Reading and Writing Project. I also see others doing the same. It's exciting to see the reading/writing projects starting to appear on the blogs.
One question I asked on Trish's blog was how "whiteness" is at work in this collection either as a concept or as an identity construction.
I'm also curious about the term ethnic rhetorics in relation to cultural rhetorics? Is ethnic rhetorics a subset of cultural rhetorics? Why not use the term cultural rhetorics instead? Too non-specific?
Robert Danberg has posted some interesting comments in relation to my Smitherman entry. He raises McWhorter's work and his disagreement with Smitherman. Take a look.
A larger question I have is what role does the conference proceedings play in the field vs. an edited collection conceived in a non-conference setting? I'm curious about the different rhetorical situations that each respond to and the different kinds of intellectual projects/processes that result. A number of you commented on the conference paper feel to many of the papers--acknowledging it as a limitation and a genre issue to be mindful of while reading. When I've talked to scholars about things they have published in conference proceedings, I usually hear a bit of an apology--"it was a conference paper" kind of remarks. What is the value of publishing more occasioned writing? How is the intellectual community/interactive feeling of a conference represented in a proceedings (or not)?
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2 comments:
Eileen,
You wrote, "I'm also curious about the term ethnic rhetorics in relation to cultural rhetorics? Is ethnic rhetorics a subset of cultural rhetorics? Why not use the term cultural rhetorics instead? Too non-specific?"
This is exactly what I was thinking and I'll have interesting stuff to check out tomorrow regarding different defintions of ethnicity and culture/al, which will enable us to see the ways in which they are similar and different. The immediate question that came to my mind was why did CCR choose cultural rhetoric over ethnic rhetoric when describing the program? Was there ever any discussion about the term ethnicity? What about the recent revision of the description? Did the talk of ethnicity ever come up? Also, I'm interesting to know if this was a historical moment in the field in terms of how it motivated people to do the work. I looked around in C's and College English and there is definitely more work being done with cultural and ethnicity (which seem to be used interchangeably in several articles I perused), yet I'm wondering if this conference was the springboard and/or catalyst for the scholarship or if there were other factors at work....
This should be a very exciting discussion tomorrow.
Tanya
Not knowing I always, thought it was question of level of generality. As a term "cultural rhetoric," implied a range of topics that might encompass-- if I use classes offered that I remember-- Eileen's class on globalization rhetoric and Scott's class on Native American rhetoric in the same department. Some might argue that "cultural rhetoric" is redundant-- rhetoric being a study of actions and products firmly rooted in their cultural moments, among other things, I realize. But my assumption was always that a point was being made, first, about rhetoric as a critical study different in some ways from the pedagogical emphasis in composition, and second, about the nature of rhetoric itself as a political and cultural matter of fact that was present always and distinct from the study of "technologies" of communication and invention and so on.
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