I've read this piece many, many times before, and each time I read, I mark. The underlinings, notations, stars, ink colors, and lead types bear witness to pieces and parts and phrases that struck me as important from reading to reading. So imagine my surprise this go-round when I realized that I had missed the main point in my previous readings. Lyons isn't advocating rhetorical sovereignty for individual students, on a parallel of the Cs' "Students' Rights to their Own Language." Rather, he's arguing for rhetorical sovereignty of a peoples... and by extension other peoples, like African Americans, disabled, etc. (I can't find that one line where he extends this call to other groups... but he did mention these groups specifically.). He uses the term rhetorics of sovereignty, specifying these rhetorics have a commitment to place, or land. These rhetorics too should be "more relevant to and reflective of actual populations of this land."
In other words, he seems to be arguing for institutionalizing comparative rhetorics (he uses this term once in the article—can't find it now, tho')-- at least at the graduate level. As for Indian rhetorics, Lyons calls for going beyond the "accounts of the wars and more of the statecraft, legends, languages, oratory, and philosophical concepts." He also points out that previous scholarship has dealt mainly with the oral Indian—as if writing Indians didn't exist in the 19th century. Lyons also recommends that universities look around and see what people are being removed or were removed from the land on which the university sits.
These recommendations bring to mind our own institutional situation and the comparative lack of knowledge about the Plateau Peoples, on whose ancestral land this university sits. Just this past week, the Washington State Magazine did an article on the Plateau Center Conference—and the main spread was about . . . food. I'll scan the article with its images for discussion this week...
All of Lyons' recommendations are curricular and at the graduate level. In another piece we'll read by Lyons later in the semester he'll offer us more about teaching undergraduates and using popular culture—based on one of his own very negative teaching experience: a class of predominately Native American students basically turned on him when he tried to get them to take action on an Indian mascot debate. I see now that I should have paired that reading with this one. The other piece really problematizes much of what he says here.
One more thing: just as we noticed that Mao used some features of Chinese-American rhetoric in his piece (along with academic discourse), so does Lyons. I love his gentle humor especially: "Rhetorial sovereignty at the C & R Ranch." Nice parodic echo of "Shootout at the OK Corral"—and parody, as we know from Pratt's essay way back in Week 2, is one of those rhetorical arts of the contact zone.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Fish with feet
In yesterday's paper, the teaser (<--Amy, what is the journalistic term for these things?!) above the masthead proclaimed "Evolution of Faith" with the subheading "Christian movement aims to help Scripture, science coexist." The image that accompanied the teasers were a couple of those stylized Christian fish you see on the back of cars. One of them had little legs and feet on it, as Darwin visualized the evolution of fish to frog and other land creatures.
[I'm going to try to post the masthead here... but if it doesn't take, I'll show you in class.]..
I couldn't help but think of Bizzell's Barcelona Disputation... as well as our talk last week about spirituality, a taboo topic in academe because it's not "rational." I thought of this connection, too, as I meditated this morning on how Zen Buddhism also confounds intellectualization, verbalization, reason for some other way of knowing, beyond naming.
Mao always confounds and frustrates me. I get his idea of the fortune cookie, and I get his notion of yin-yang. But I seem to be getting further away from understanding his notion of Chinese face, as lian and mianzi, every time I read it. Hope someone can explain it to us tomorrow in class. Also, I did see perhaps for the first time that Mao's own writing style aims to enact the Chinese American rhetorical practices he describes: ”indirectness" insinuating "richly vague significances" evolving and involving readers to make meaning together. Ironic that because he is the professor, his ways of knowing and being become the norm that students have to adapt to. That move reminds me of something Alma said in her first blog about having international grad students as TAs in class and students' complaints about having instructors whom they can't understand; as Alma points out, the role reversal is itself a good lesson in power, language, and cultural mediation.
Bizzell, Romano, and Mao together actually raised my hopes for academe, if not American education more generally. Working from a cultural production—rather than a cultural reproduction—model, all show how nondominant groups co-opt dominant discursive practices and, at least in specific historical moments, confound and upend the power structures that would subjugate them. "You can't dismantle the Master's house using the Master's tools" I think Audre Lorde said. Oh yes you can. Witness the Jewish rhetor using reason to out-reason the Christians. Witness the indios—labeled as monkeys and magpies—taking over those translation projects, reversing the usual teacher/student relationship. And here's Mao, getting published in Cs, basically enacting a Chinese-American rhetoric in the most important journal in our field (and driving me and Paul absolutely wild). I'm reminded too of the history of Plateau Indians. As the saying goes, "yesterday's warriors are today's lawyers." English forced on them as a colonizing force, Plateau Indians have mastered legal discourse and over several decades have won and are continuing win huge legal battles, asserting their treaty rights—treaties that were in fact supposed to assimilate Indians to American ways and dismantle tribalism. As Amy pointed out in her blog, social justice is incremental.
'Course, such 'victories' are often pyrrhic (ex. American Indians) or short-lived. Bizzell's Jewish rhetor wound up getting run off to Israel, leaving behind his family; a hundred years later Jews were massacred in Spain and ultimately outlawed (in 1492) altogether. Romano's Tlaltelolco was axed by the Inquisition, and the Franciscans realigned their educational practices to reinforce power hierarchy and forestall future racial and linquistic cross-dressing. But over time, those increments add up.
Still, I come back to that Christian-Darwinian, amphibian fish, comfortable in water and on land. Discourses—the word itself means "back and forth," no?—do morph upon contact. And spirituality and science can co-exist and copulate without contradiction—except in a (hyper)rationalist universe.
Friday, February 2, 2007
Pink Sweet Peas
Anzaldua mentions going to a women's retreat in 1979 where she "was made (once again) to feel she was being labeled—tokenized as a 'third-world woman' and as an outsider, an exoticized other to the white feminists there" (p. 44).
Which reminded of the point I started to make last week (and then forgot what I was going to say) about my own experience with a women's "consciousness-raising" group around 1975. While the focus of that particular group was body awareness, what we soon discovered was that we were different in more ways than one. The first difference that arose was sexuality. Followed closely by socioeconomic class. And then race/ethnicity. In that order. By the end of the month (about 4 meetings) we weren't even speaking to one another, and the group broke up.
That experience mirrors Anzaldua's own…which in turn reflects the larger trend in "The Movement," aka the feminist movement, whose beginning in the US is generally marked by the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique and whose "face" in the 1970s was Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. magazine. Notice: both Gloria and Betty were middle-class white women… a point not lost on all kinds of women, but first by lesbians, then working-class women, then etc. etc. (notice, the same order?) By the early 80s we were talking about "feminisms" plural, as women began to recognize that we can't all be lumped together, that maybe the "female experience" alone wasn't universal and uniform enough to create solidarity.
And so it goes with identity studies more generally, it seems to me. I was impressed to see that Anzaldua talked about "the multiplicity of her 'self' and her 'voice'", assuming as her avatar Shiva with different feet in different places (p.44). She maintains that a "mesitza rhetoric" allows her to "find all others in one's self; one's self in all others" (p. 44). The "new mestiza" has "a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity" (pp. 44-45).
For sure, I agree with the idea that identity is multiple. But I would add that the same is true, to different degrees of course, of every one.(Does my memory fail me or doesn't Harraway also talk in these terms about "cyborgs"?)
I'm also uncomfortable with the mestiza metaphor for at least two reasons:
1. it suggests that identity is still a function of "blood quantum." (Remember talking about sweet peas to learn genetics in high school? What do you get when you cross a white sweet pea with a red one?.... pink sweet pea, a hybrid, a mestiza, a mixed blood…) Identity isn't genetic or "natural"; it's cultural and historical.
2. it draws from Hegelian logic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Ironically, this kind of logic does NOT tolerate contradiction and ambiguity…
(I'll talk more about different logical systems, and how those differences will sometimes affect argument structure and interaction and decision-making in upcoming weeks.)
One more thing about the Anzaldua piece: I was blown away with the discursive features of this text: child-like graphics, work play (Nos/Otros how cool was that!!), metaphors, code-switching, etc … each and all implicitly "[denouncing] linguistic terrorism" (p. 45)
The Holliday IC resource book this week makes a similar point about identity—but points out that white people have culture too. Left unsaid or unrecognized, that fact leaves the impression that white ways are normative. At the same time, we don't want to fall into the contrastive trap, setting up a binary of white/black, us/them, insider/outsider, etc. (Anzaldua also mentions that she tries to verbalize and understand herself as a "non-binary identity").
Unfortunately that's what seems to be happening in my chapter on Detroit when I use Kochman to set up my theoretical framework for understanding differences governing personal disclosure. Funny, I knew this at the time but I just didn't know how to do it otherwise. While I tried to complicate that easy understanding later in the chapter (drawing from other disciplines) I should have done that upfront. There was just too much material, it seemed at the time. A similar problem comes up for the Storytime on the Reservation chapter: essentializing culture, or so it would seem. I wrote the Detroit chapter in 2000-2001 and the Storytime chapter in 2002 and the last I saw the manuscript was in 2003, when it started through the production process—and I haven't read it since, until last night. Now I'm able to read it as if it was someone else's—which is to say,with a much clearer eye.
Our readings over the next couple of weeks will focus on case studies—all of which have come out in the last few years—paying close attention to methodology and theoretical framings, though no one doing much with interdisciplinary approaches.
Which reminded of the point I started to make last week (and then forgot what I was going to say) about my own experience with a women's "consciousness-raising" group around 1975. While the focus of that particular group was body awareness, what we soon discovered was that we were different in more ways than one. The first difference that arose was sexuality. Followed closely by socioeconomic class. And then race/ethnicity. In that order. By the end of the month (about 4 meetings) we weren't even speaking to one another, and the group broke up.
That experience mirrors Anzaldua's own…which in turn reflects the larger trend in "The Movement," aka the feminist movement, whose beginning in the US is generally marked by the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique and whose "face" in the 1970s was Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. magazine. Notice: both Gloria and Betty were middle-class white women… a point not lost on all kinds of women, but first by lesbians, then working-class women, then etc. etc. (notice, the same order?) By the early 80s we were talking about "feminisms" plural, as women began to recognize that we can't all be lumped together, that maybe the "female experience" alone wasn't universal and uniform enough to create solidarity.
And so it goes with identity studies more generally, it seems to me. I was impressed to see that Anzaldua talked about "the multiplicity of her 'self' and her 'voice'", assuming as her avatar Shiva with different feet in different places (p.44). She maintains that a "mesitza rhetoric" allows her to "find all others in one's self; one's self in all others" (p. 44). The "new mestiza" has "a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity" (pp. 44-45).
For sure, I agree with the idea that identity is multiple. But I would add that the same is true, to different degrees of course, of every one.(Does my memory fail me or doesn't Harraway also talk in these terms about "cyborgs"?)
I'm also uncomfortable with the mestiza metaphor for at least two reasons:
1. it suggests that identity is still a function of "blood quantum." (Remember talking about sweet peas to learn genetics in high school? What do you get when you cross a white sweet pea with a red one?.... pink sweet pea, a hybrid, a mestiza, a mixed blood…) Identity isn't genetic or "natural"; it's cultural and historical.
2. it draws from Hegelian logic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Ironically, this kind of logic does NOT tolerate contradiction and ambiguity…
(I'll talk more about different logical systems, and how those differences will sometimes affect argument structure and interaction and decision-making in upcoming weeks.)
One more thing about the Anzaldua piece: I was blown away with the discursive features of this text: child-like graphics, work play (Nos/Otros how cool was that!!), metaphors, code-switching, etc … each and all implicitly "[denouncing] linguistic terrorism" (p. 45)
The Holliday IC resource book this week makes a similar point about identity—but points out that white people have culture too. Left unsaid or unrecognized, that fact leaves the impression that white ways are normative. At the same time, we don't want to fall into the contrastive trap, setting up a binary of white/black, us/them, insider/outsider, etc. (Anzaldua also mentions that she tries to verbalize and understand herself as a "non-binary identity").
Unfortunately that's what seems to be happening in my chapter on Detroit when I use Kochman to set up my theoretical framework for understanding differences governing personal disclosure. Funny, I knew this at the time but I just didn't know how to do it otherwise. While I tried to complicate that easy understanding later in the chapter (drawing from other disciplines) I should have done that upfront. There was just too much material, it seemed at the time. A similar problem comes up for the Storytime on the Reservation chapter: essentializing culture, or so it would seem. I wrote the Detroit chapter in 2000-2001 and the Storytime chapter in 2002 and the last I saw the manuscript was in 2003, when it started through the production process—and I haven't read it since, until last night. Now I'm able to read it as if it was someone else's—which is to say,with a much clearer eye.
Our readings over the next couple of weeks will focus on case studies—all of which have come out in the last few years—paying close attention to methodology and theoretical framings, though no one doing much with interdisciplinary approaches.
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