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?