It all comes down to Kennedy

I hope that search engines will not pick up this line and net a bunch of people who are lovers of the Kennedys (JFK, RFK, JFK Junior). I hope people won't read this and think I'm going to talk about the grassy knoll and the book depository and whether or not it was Oswald or the CIA who shot Kennedy.... Maybe people will think that the Kennedy I'm referring to is the band known as the Dead Kennedys (if you don't know what that refers to, then I'm feeling really old).

OK, nuff. I'm troping on Carol Lipson's line in her essay in _Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks_. She says that ancient Egyptian rhetoric all comes down to "Maat." And it's interesting to note that in the _Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks_, it all comes to George Kennedy as a starting point. Kennedy's book is a starting point and departure point for all kinds of investigations of ancient rhetorics from a variety of cultures. His work is also found to be inevitably flawed since it assumes the Greco-Roman tradition as the beginning and "normativizing" point for cross-cultural study (Lipson and Binkley 2). Here's what Lipson and Binkley have to say:

"George Kennedy's 1998 Comparative Rhetoric pioneers in this arena and is often used in the many courses being created. . . on comparative, alternative or multicultural rhetorics. But there is need for much more work, particularly for studies that approach the analysis of ancient cultural rhetorics from perspectives that do not seem to reify classical rhetoric as the culmination of the development of ancient rhetorical systems" (2).

Several other authors in the collection and also Campbell ("African Athens") acknowledge the influence of Kennedy. His book is an important departure point, but it is also inevitably flawed b/c it presents one version of ancient rhetorics as the main one. As the Lipson and Binkley collection shows, the origins of rhetoric go way, way back and we must analyze and assess contributions that come from vastly different geographic and cultural spaces than those we have been conditioned to expect through our originary narratives.

A few questions that always get played out in comparative study include:
What is being compared? What is the basis of comparison? What is the originary narrative? As Binkley puts it:

"Crossing disciplinary boundaries, I find that embedded within the methodologies of my own area of rhetoric are often unstated, and frequently unconscious, theoretical assumptions. Among those governing assumptions is the conception of the nature of origins, one which focuses on the origination of rhetoric in the Greek classical period of the late 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E." (47).

Binkley warns us about the "othering" that happens when we consider rhetorical traditions outside the originary narrative of Greco-Roman rhetoric (and she argues that contemporary discourses continue to color the representations of specific discourses and figures--9/11 discourses, for instance). She and Swearingen, in particular, ask us to look at figures and rhetorical practices in Ancient cultures that go outside of the parameters of our originary narratives and our parameters surrounding who can "do rhetoric." How have specific ancient cultures been "othered"--Mesopotamia, for instance (48). And how have specific forms of expression been "othered"--women's hymns and lamentations and African rhetorics. What investments do scholars of rhetoric have in maintaining specific geopolitical and cultural locations for their work? All of the writers we have read this week challenge us to look carefully at our originary narratives and to think about what is at stake in them.

What is key here is the question of representation as well as historiography.

--What is rhetoric in the specific cultural system that is being analyzed. How are definitions of rhetoric developed within the culture itself? What does it mean to analyze a culture rhetorically from a vantage point within the culture vs. outside from a Western perspective.
--Are these works social histories? Something else entirely?
-What about the problem of translation and the problem of finding extant texts. All the writers struggle with these questions, and what do they do to resolve them?
--How do we control for/address our own desires to find what we want to find in the past and map our contemporary desires on to ancient cultures?
--How do we balance the "strangeness" of these cultures, our estrangement from them, and our desire to make them familiar and graspable. What rhetorical methods and methodologies can help us as we struggle to do this work?
--What does ancient rhetorical study provide us--why does it matter? Clearly, we are being asked to reconceive our comfortable originary narratives, but what else do we gain when we revise Western rhetorics? What is it about our current historical moment that necessitates this "excavation" of "non-Western rhetorics."

I also balk at terms like "non-Western rhetorics" or "alternative rhetorics." I respect that we are grappling with ways to talk about and outside the Greco-Roman tradition. But non-Western implies that other cultures are being compared to the West. Alternative rhetoric implies an alternative to a dominant system. What about plan old "Cultural rhetorics"?

The book review I sent out to the 751 class by Teresa Grettano does a good job of summing up the readings we are taking up tomorrow, so I won't go systematically through them at this point.

Still out here blogging

It makes me happy to see that all of the graduate students who took my 601 course last fall are still out there blogging a year plus later. Granted, I'm asking some of these folks to blog in the course they are taking with me now, but still....the blogs have stuck or they have stuck due to force of habit. It has been interesting to see what blogs become when they are not course-focused. How they meander to other topics--or not. Right now, in 751, we are moving way from blogging readings to blogging projects or writing up notes for the projects. Some folks don't want to blog their notes and put their projects out there, and I can understand that. Interestingly, this semester I thought nothing of posting an unpublished paper that I gave at CCCC on Emma Willard and Catherine Beecher a few years ago. Should I have hesitated? I guess I didn't. If someone wants that paper, they can have it. I feel like I was scooped anyway when I read Lindal Buchanan and I thought she said it better than me.

Madeline Yonker is going to visit the Nottingham Senior Living Community where I teach to give a talk to my senior writers about blogging. We're looking forward to it. Some of the folks in their eighties and nineties are thinking about starting blogs...

Anyway, will blog more tomorrow about Lipson and Binkley's collection.

Disciplinary Dis-orientations and Queering Rhetorics

This week's readings allow us to see the various moments of disciplinary orientation and reorientation that happen when rhetoric is queered and queerness is rhetoricized (the premise of Kelly Rawson's major exam). I'd like to focus on Charles Morris's collection since no one has blogged about his work yet (the night is still young in CCR land, I realize).

I really appreciate the way Morris begins the collection _Queering Public Address_ with the Seneca Falls "boys" photograph. His point is that the photograph is a metonym for all the possiblities of doing queer rhetorical work. What the Seneca Falls "Boys" represent is, as Morris points out, subject to interpretation and subject to "historically specific cultural peformances, politics, and meanings" (3). The "Boys, elusively available on E-Bay, are now are enshrined in the collection of Andrew K. Schultz. The portrait, of course, poses all kinds of questions related to queer historiography. How can we hail the "boys" as historical subjects? How do we read their portrait, and through what lenses? How and in what way are they boys? What pleasures and satisfactions do we get from our viewing and from our understandings and mis-understandings of the portrait? What are we to make of the conventions of portraiture as exercise here? What's there, what is not there? Morris deliberately doesn't tell us much about the "Boys," but he does bring them into the project of the book as a way to foreground questions about doing queer rhetorical histories. And using the term "boys" is really interesting. Are these boys? Why use that term and not another?

"Queer sexuality as a prism for public address" is the focus of this book, and it lives up to that promise. Yet studying public address, as Morris notes, has been a pretty normative space and practice. The scholar of public address traditionally was to look for the great orator (good man speaking well) and look for his (and it was usually a HE) for the rhetor's magnum opus, his greatest speech of all time, the pinnacle of rhetorical achievement. Poststructuralism, cultural studies, and FEMINISMS (which Morris does not mention at first) have played a role in repositioning those notions of public address: challenging view of textuality, discursive traditions, communities, performance. So public address studies has begun to interrogate and reconfigure its boundaries and conceptual categorizations. But..... that only goes so far. As Morris points out, there is a resounding silence about queerness in public address scholarship and in archives and other spaces in rhetorical studies:

"In public address such silences echo through the archives, anthologies, syllabi, reviews, journals, and bibliographies that fail to speak or that distort and diminish, our names and invisible processes by which they are achieved, normalized, and perpetuated" (4).

The book aims to disrupt those silences and omissions, and it aims to establish a "beach head" in rhetorical studies for queer work. In fact, Morris makes a strong statement about not abandoning rhetorical studies and lighting out (as Huck Finn would say) for more queer-friendly academic territory or, as he puts it, "queer hospitable academic locations." In fact, Morris throws down the academic gauntlet. We are going to "stay our home ground and render it pink," he says (queer world-making as Berlant and Warner would say) (5). So in other words, Morris et al is here, queer, and the field damn well better get used to it, adapt, change, and make room. Now this is a manifesto!

That said, Morris goes on to explain that the collection he and the contributors have put together is, er, well, eclectic, but that's the beauty of it. The book appears to break out along the lines of historical recovery (uncovering and recovering or recuperating queer figures/rhetors) and also the work of exploding the categories of public address and of normativity writ large, what he deems the more radical work of queering historical studies. He returns to the Seneca Falls "Boys" as a way to pose these different approaches. The historical recovery model would be more interested in recuperating the photograph as an example of "recovery"--here are two men, likely lovers, captured at a moment in time in a place (Seneca Falls). Their presence is a testimony to queer life at that time. The more radical queer history approach, according to Morris, would not assign meaning or historical value to the photograph, but would be more interested in mapping the discourses we use to construct our readings of it--the discourses that shape our understanding of normativity and sexuality, our reading practices, the normative reach of public address. Morris continually asks us to return to interrogating our own stakes, our own desires, in writing histories, queering histories, engaging queer ideas. I like that he challenges us to go beyond recovery to theorizing and interrogating queerness and rhetoric as well.

The last few pages of the introduction raise many questions that I think we should read aloud in class. I won't record them all here, but I'll highlight the ones that stick out:


How is public address and rhetoric a regime of the normal??
How is rhetoric a regime of the normal? In what ways does rhetoric
s disciplinary and historical moorings constrain queer world making and queer histories?
What possibilities and pitfalls are there to an approach like Morris's of trying to "queer" a whole area of rhetorical study--public address. Where does the volume succeed, where does it not, and why?
What are the methodological risks taken as Morris and others try to queer rhetoric and rhetoricize queer theory?

Follow-up to Damian's talk

I'd like to pursue a bit further the question I asked of Damian after his talk today. Laurie echoes this question, to some degree, on her blog when she asks about Damian's inclusion or exclusion of Greco-Roman theories of rhetoric.

My question today was really about the parallels as well as divergences that Damian sees between his work and that of scholars who are doing revisionist histories of ancient rhetorics such as Carol Lipson and others in her edited collection _Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks_ or Kermit Campbell (his recent article) or Lu on Ancient Chinese Rhetorics. Although Damian is not dealing with a BCE time period, I do wonder about fruitful links that could be made between MesoAmerican cultures and that of African cultures, Middle Eastern cultures, and Asian cultures.

Rhetoric of the Americas, not America

All of the readings for this week's class on Social Histories of Latino/a rhetorics ask us to consider four main questions:

--What do we classify as writing, and why?
--Where do we locate our originary narratives of rhetoric and writing in the Americas? In other words, what might social histories of Latino/a rhetorics tell us about our traditional narratives of rhetoric that are drawn from the Greco-Roman tradition?
--What happens to our views of rhetoric and rhetorical education if we locate our originary narratives in different spaces and places outside of the Greco-Roman tradition?
--What can codex technologies teach us about rhetoric and writing?

Damian Baca amplifies these questions in his piece, asking us to consider a different trajectory for studying acts of witing:

"If, rather than theorizing rhetoric and writing based on the pedagogically vanguard “Composing-East-to-West” trajectory, specialists instead accept Mestiz@ codices as starting points, we are then left with expressions better suited to emerging non-Western rhetorics as well as current material realities in America and beyond."

I've execrpted some other quotations from Damian's book chapter that I will revisit later or in class. I need to go vote and am taking my senior citizen writers to Tracy Kidder's lecture tonight. However, I'll post these sections now so I can begin thinking about what they mean in relation to the work that Romano, Dussel, Villaneuva, and Calafell are doing.

Quote #1:

"Consequently, new modes of Mestiz@ historiography imply new ways to interpret history, rhetoric and composition, thereby having substantial implications for both practitioners and writing students.When in history did the Americas become literate, literary, and rhetorical? When did writing begin in North America? According to whose measuring stick? What counts as writing and what does it mean to be literate? What does it mean to be civilized? In the context of these crucial pedagogical questions, in Chapter Five I will examine more closely how writing specialists might read Mestiz@ scripts as a theoretical and historiographical paradigm, as a new vantage point to rethink the relationship between supposedly expanding notions of literacy and composition. The codices evidence precisely what the dominant historical imaginary erases and what English Composition lacks: co-evolutionary or parallel histories of writing and rhetoric in the Americas. This in turn radically compromises the cultural authority and hegemony of Composition’s historical emphasis on writing only as alphabetized, visible, and Anglo-European speech" (Baca)

Quote #2:
"Rethinking rhetoric and writing from Mestiz@ codex legacies advances a more constructive understanding of parallel writing systems and rationalities in America yet also promotes a critical intervention in the politics of writing instruction in the present. Such an intervention involves a decided departure from the paradigm of alphabetic supremacy. Writing specialists today need to invent far beyond the myths of a Greco-Roman horizon toward its challenges and mutations on a global scale. As writing specialists in the twenty-first century, we need to enact a new politics of rhetorical inquiry that reads colonial history both backward and forward, and aims to significantly revise the dominant narratives of Mesoamerican assimilation" (Baca).

Also, in what ways do these questions and comments relate to our discussion in past weeks of African American rhetorics, disability rhetorics, and Native American rhetorics?