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.