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.