Sunday, August 10, 2014
Writing and Globalization
Dr. Indra N. Mukhopadhyay discusses rhetoric and composition pedagogy in his design of a new undergraduate writing course centered on globalization.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Toward an Understanding of Global Rhetorics
As
the title of this entry suggests, my argument here is tentative, and preliminary. My hope is to inaugurate a discussion that resituates
the content and practice of teaching first-year Rhetoric and Composition within
a broader, global perspective. In U.S.
universities, first-year writing courses are almost universally taught from a
‘western’ perspective. Although that
cultural designation is rarely made explicit, the assigned and anthologized
authors, and the theorists of rhetoric, are consistently European or North
American. This reifies a disciplinary
identity and pedagogical practice that effectively excludes several significant
traditions in reasoning, argumentation, and composition that have existed, in
parallel, in other places.
It is possible for me to make this argument, I think, because I am an
outsider in the field. My Ph.D. is in
Comparative Literature. I specialized in
comparative colonial and postcolonial studies.
In other words, like many teaching writing today, I did not major in Rhetoric
and Composition. When I came to my
current position, an Assistant Professor in a Writing Program, I had to learn
about teaching writing. I began to inform
myself. I looked through numerous
anthologies and rhetorics and our own Writing Program Coursebook. I read current journal articles to understand
the state of the field and the practice.
And I saw that it all seemed very ‘western.’
Everything always starts with Aristotle,
you maybe move on to a bit of Cicero, occasionally you get a side of Bacon, and
of you course end up at Kenneth Burke. These
authors are never explicitly labeled as ‘western,’
but that is a silence which in itself reproduces the notion of the ‘western’ as
being the norm, the standard, the canonical, without needing to say so.
In all these anthologies and articles, ‘other’ traditions are rarely
talked about.
But, these are observations readily
made. Other scholars in the field have
identified these fundamental aporia and tried to move beyond them. Wendy Hesford's recent essay offers an excellent overview of this work, but in itself
does not articulate a synthesizing argument or vision for answering the
problem. George Kennedy’s
groundbreaking book, Comparative Rhetoric, presents an ambitious theory and surveys several rhetorical
traditions; however, it leaves out the immense archives of Arabic and Persian rhetoric
and textual theory, and includes an old-fashioned discussion of India and
China. For example:
India, where time often seemed to stand still, developed no strong historiographic tradition; until the invasion of
Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BCE, dates and details of political history are much more scanty than in
the early history of Mesopotamia, Egypt, or China. There is a vast body of ancient Indian literature…most of this
literature is religious in nature and reveals little about public address in secular contexts.
India, where time often seemed to stand still, developed no strong historiographic tradition; until the invasion of
Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BCE, dates and details of political history are much more scanty than in
the early history of Mesopotamia, Egypt, or China. There is a vast body of ancient Indian literature…most of this
literature is religious in nature and reveals little about public address in secular contexts.
The
Orientalist stereotypes, in a work from 1997, are shocking: a timeless,
ahistorical India that learns history from Greeks and is religious
essence. A significant rhetorical
tradition that dates back over three thousand years and continues to this day
should be not be framed in these ways.
Generalizations
of this sort are largely absent from Carol Lipson’s and Roberta Binkley’s
collection of essays, Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks. Indeed, their work includes a compelling
section on teaching global traditions in the context of composition, although
the authors in their volume focus on Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel, and China, so
yet again, India is left out, as are the Arabic and Persian traditions.
A consistent pattern that emerges
from all of this work that has been done on ‘world rhetorics’ is that it frames
the ‘global’ in terms of the ‘ancient.’ They
take a fundamentally historical approach.
The ‘world’ traditions are in the
ancient past, and the modern, living site of rhetoric is the West.
This ‘ancient’ and dead framing is
eschewed by the large and recent body of work on the rhetoric of the first
nations, but the emphasis in many of those discussions is the writing that was produced
in the contact zone when the first nations met the west.
The emergent field of Cross-Cultural
Rhetoric offers several models for approaching writing in global ways. Alyssa O'Brien, a leading innovator in the
field, emphasizes teaching present-day
intercultural competencies, but this may be at the expense of the genealogical
and contextual conditions that produce the essays and collaborative discussions
in which her students participate.
After noticing this absence of the
global as equal and living co-creators of theories of rhetoric and composition,
my postcolonial training kicked in and I began to think how to approach this,
what insight can this structural blindness provide? I’ve formulated three questions that I’m
still working through. Can scholarship
on Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese philological and grammatical traditions create a space for understanding
global rhetorics? Can the current framiing of rhetoric be understood as a
‘westernization’ along the lines of what Martin Bernal argued in Black Athena?
How do we avoid an ‘anthropological’ approach, in the sense of this is what
‘the other’ does, this is how ‘the other’ writes?
I hope to embark in a few different
directions from what has preceded, by
first opening up the definition of ‘global rhetoric’ so as to include
examples from early modern philological and grammatical traditions. These are: the Zahirites of Moorish Cordoba
(Arabic), Yan Roju (Sino-Tibetan), Melpathur Narayana (Sanskrit), and Siraj
al-Din Ali Khan (Persian).
Philology might be a slightly vague
and passé term, and it might not seem directly related here, but including philology actually harks back to early
conceptions of Rhetoric and Composition. Ross Winterowd, the founder of USC’s
original Rhetoric program and inspiration to many who followed, always insisted
on the tripartite: Rhetoric, Linguistics, and Literature formulation. More
recently, Sheldon Pollock's defense of philology offers some compelling
connections to think through.
For Pollock, an Indologist, philology
is more than comparative grammars and syntaxes, it is more than close reading,
it is, “the discipline of making sense of texts – the theory of textuality as
well as the history of textualized meaning.
philology is and has always been a global knowledge practice.” In his essay Pollock discusses Yan Roju’s
work in China, and Narayana’s and Siraj al-Din Ali Khan’s work in India, who
were all writing around the 16th to 17th centuries, and
the way he talks about them – their attention to context, their theorizing
methods for interpretation, their attention to the reader-writer transaction, their
connecting historicism and humanism – all suggest that these early modern
philologists from around the world can inform the future of rhetoric and
composition. Similarly, Edward Said's discussion of the Zahirites in Cordoba
also includes a discussion of the theory of lanuage, and of grounding arguments,
that applies to how composition teachers talk about rhetoric.
So, although Pollock and Said are in
very different fields – Comparative Literature, and Indology, their discussion deepens the comparative
contextualization of rhetoric begun by Kennedy, Lipson, and Binkley. Moreover,
their examples restore some of the continuities and contentions between the
global ‘ancients’ and the global ‘moderns.’
Here I hope to apply and modify some
of Martin Bernal’s arguments in Black Athena and postcolonial theory. Bernal’s
work meticulously argues two points. First, there was a whitewashing of the ancient
model - the ancient Greeks recognized
the influence of Egyptian and Semitic cultures on them, but, those influences
were minimized and silenced in favor of the theorized Indo-European invaders
from the north. Ancient Greece was
‘moved up’ away from the Mediterranean, and into ‘Europe.’ This was done, ironically, by philologists of
the 19th century. Bernal’s second argument flows from his first: the
creation of the ‘classical world’ as we knew it up until a couple decades ago
happened through modern racist
frameworks.
Put another way, the classical world,
and by extension classical rhetoric came out of a very particular moment in the
18th and 19th centuries: the Enlightenment, the modern
state, the institutionalization of law and rhetoric, and the imperial
situation. To understand global
rhetorics, we have to understand these intersections.
Global rhetorics are living
traditions which still inform rhetorical and textual practices today. In looking
at them this way, we can avoid the notion of ‘rhetorics of the world’ – which
runs the risk of essentializing some sense of difference and ‘otherness’
inherent in various cultures and categories. My intention is not an ethnographic
or anthropological survey of how ‘others’ did rhetoric. I also don’t want to compare or map onto
‘other’ rhetorics the labels and terms that we use from Classical Rhetoric.
Rather, my project seeks to explore the possibilities in diversifying how we
learn and teach rhetoric and writing – not so that they can be labeled
‘Chinese,’ ‘Arabic,’ ‘Sanskrit,’ and ‘Western,’ but rather so that the various
modes and methods can be understood on their own terms, and for their
situational effectiveness.
Understanding global rhetorics in this way bears great potential in the
first-year composition classroom.
Teaching global rhetorics will help students to recognize rhetorical
situations that ‘western rhetoric’ doesn’t prepare them to see. Persuasion, analysis, criticism, personal
expression, there are indicative of a certain structure, approach and
mindset. But, comedy, healing,
conciliation, silence, these are also rhetorical purposes that have their place
in a composition course.
Responding to the changing
demographics of undergraduates, and preparing for the future of the American
university and the future of Rhetoric and Composition will involve teaching
students and teaching teachers in new, innovative, and inclusive ways. The richness of intellectual diversity
brought to American universities by foreign students and foreign professors
should be embraced as generative resources for the future of Rhetoric and Composition,
not anomalies which need to be remediated and compartmentalized. In order to do this it is necessary to
interrogate our discipline’s own constructedness and recognize the original
forms of knowledge that emerge from a globally-informed episteme. Working toward a new understanding of global
rhetorics will force us to redefine how we assess the notion of ‘basic writing
skills’ in international and minority students, interrogate what it means to
normalize them into the ‘academic discourse community,’ and at the same time
broaden the civic work of rhetoric and composition in such a way that expands
the critical imagination and pluralizes social awareness.
I know all of this cannot be achieved
by one person. My hope is that more
scholars will join this conversation, enrich it, and help in pursuing further
questions: Would an understanding of global rhetorics alter the objectives and
outcomes of a first-year composition course, or would it reaffirm its most
fundamental principles? What would teaching global rhetorics look like in the
writing classroom? How would a reading list be determined? How would we teach process differently? What would a grading rubric look like? How would assessment work?
Saturday, March 10, 2012
3.6.12 The Legacies of Empire: Introductory Remarks
Dr. Indra N. Mukhopadhyay at The Dornsife Commons panel discussion "The Legacies of Empire."
Featured Artist: Asian Dub Foundation
Featured Artist: Asian Dub Foundation
Monday, March 5, 2012
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
The Arts of Resistance Event Featured in The Daily Trojan
Kip Fulbeck discusses race, identity
Identity is more than race, and race has no biological basis, said Kip Fulbeck, who spoke at The Arts of Resistance, an Uncommon Conversation at USC Dornsife event in Doheny Memorial Library on Tuesday.
“I was born in a time when in some states, my parent’s marriage was illegal,” said Fulbeck, whose father is Caucasian and mother is Asian. As a child, Fulbeck, who grew up in Covina, Calif., said his classmates told him almost every joke imaginable that referenced Long Duck Dong, the foreign exchange student from China in the 1984 movie Sixteen Candles starring Molly Ringwald. With such stereotypical Asian characters, film and television perpetuated a particular stereotype that still exists in recent movies, including The Hangover, and television, such as the CBS series 2 Broke Girls.
Fulbeck, an artist and professor at UC Santa Barbara and UC San Diego, began the event by showing a short video he made featuring his son, Jack, who Fulbeck said inspires him to make art and identify “the weirdest stuff in the world,” such as why every wristwatch advertisement sets the time on the watch to 10:10.
“When I go to Ikea, I wonder why I’m the only one who is bothered I’m being treated like a mouse,” that must follow a specific pathway to navigate the store, Fulbeck said. This sense of awareness and realization that something “normal” is abnormal or weird is what Fulbeck said is the focus on his art, books, spoken word, video and speaking events.
“Part of my job as an artist is to point out the stuff that is already out there that is really weird.”
One example that Fulbeck asked the audience of the event to answer was: “Name a movie where an Asian-American kisses someone,” Fulbeck said to a silent audience. “Is that strange to you? … I think everything’s got to be challenged.”
The event, which was attended by students, faculty and friends of Fulbeck, is part of a three-part series organized by Indra Mukhopadhyay, a lecturer in the writing program who created the series around the theme of empire, imperialism and resistance.
“So much of resistance is conceived as the opposite of what’s happening,” said Mukhopadhyay, who first saw Fulbeck speak at the University of Michigan in 1999. “[Fulbeck’s] work gets you out of this binary.”
Mukhopadhyay also said he appreciated the humor Fulbeck included in his work, which serves as a cultural analysis.
“I’m really hopeful,” Mukhopadhyay said after the event. “[Fulbeck’s] art makes you feel positive that there still is a possibility of change and hope.”
Fulbeck presented pieces from his three book projects: Part Asian, 100% Hapa, Permanence: Tattoo Portraits and Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids, all of which feature a person photographed on a white background next to the person’s response to a question. In his book about Hapa identity, Fulbeck asked 1,200 participants — 100 of which Fulbeck included in the book — of all ages to write a response to the question, “What are you?” Responses varied from toddlers scribbling or drawing pictures to a man responding, “I make trash cans for a living. You think of trash, you think of Mike.”
“It’s not a book about race. It’s a book about identity,” said Fulbeck, who also said diversity encompasses more than race, including gender, economic status, physical abilities, country of origin, body type and much more.
Though “Hapa” is a slang term describing mixed heritage or roots of Asian and/or Pacific Islander ancestry, Fulbeck said the term can be loosely interpreted as participants of his project showed.
“The most important part of this project for me was that it forced me to be around people who were different than me,” said Fulbeck, who displayed this project in a five-month-long exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in 2008, where visitors could respond and display their photos and responses to “What are you?”
“[Fulbeck’s] work is very unique and inspiring, especially as a reminder to why we’re here. He definitely gives a very unique take on multiculturalism and what that movement is,” said Alanah Joseph, a junior majoring in communication. “We need more refreshing teachers [like Fulbeck] who bring energy to the room and inspire people to not be so adamant about the ‘A’ [letter grade], and focus on the learning experience in general.”
“I was born in a time when in some states, my parent’s marriage was illegal,” said Fulbeck, whose father is Caucasian and mother is Asian. As a child, Fulbeck, who grew up in Covina, Calif., said his classmates told him almost every joke imaginable that referenced Long Duck Dong, the foreign exchange student from China in the 1984 movie Sixteen Candles starring Molly Ringwald. With such stereotypical Asian characters, film and television perpetuated a particular stereotype that still exists in recent movies, including The Hangover, and television, such as the CBS series 2 Broke Girls.
Artist and professor Kip Fulbeck spoke about identity and race at The Arts of Resistance, an Uncommon Conversation at USC Dornsife event in Doheny Memorial Library on Tuesday. - Adrian Hoffmann | Daily Trojan
“When I go to Ikea, I wonder why I’m the only one who is bothered I’m being treated like a mouse,” that must follow a specific pathway to navigate the store, Fulbeck said. This sense of awareness and realization that something “normal” is abnormal or weird is what Fulbeck said is the focus on his art, books, spoken word, video and speaking events.
“Part of my job as an artist is to point out the stuff that is already out there that is really weird.”
One example that Fulbeck asked the audience of the event to answer was: “Name a movie where an Asian-American kisses someone,” Fulbeck said to a silent audience. “Is that strange to you? … I think everything’s got to be challenged.”
The event, which was attended by students, faculty and friends of Fulbeck, is part of a three-part series organized by Indra Mukhopadhyay, a lecturer in the writing program who created the series around the theme of empire, imperialism and resistance.
“So much of resistance is conceived as the opposite of what’s happening,” said Mukhopadhyay, who first saw Fulbeck speak at the University of Michigan in 1999. “[Fulbeck’s] work gets you out of this binary.”
Mukhopadhyay also said he appreciated the humor Fulbeck included in his work, which serves as a cultural analysis.
“I’m really hopeful,” Mukhopadhyay said after the event. “[Fulbeck’s] art makes you feel positive that there still is a possibility of change and hope.”
Fulbeck presented pieces from his three book projects: Part Asian, 100% Hapa, Permanence: Tattoo Portraits and Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids, all of which feature a person photographed on a white background next to the person’s response to a question. In his book about Hapa identity, Fulbeck asked 1,200 participants — 100 of which Fulbeck included in the book — of all ages to write a response to the question, “What are you?” Responses varied from toddlers scribbling or drawing pictures to a man responding, “I make trash cans for a living. You think of trash, you think of Mike.”
“It’s not a book about race. It’s a book about identity,” said Fulbeck, who also said diversity encompasses more than race, including gender, economic status, physical abilities, country of origin, body type and much more.
Though “Hapa” is a slang term describing mixed heritage or roots of Asian and/or Pacific Islander ancestry, Fulbeck said the term can be loosely interpreted as participants of his project showed.
“The most important part of this project for me was that it forced me to be around people who were different than me,” said Fulbeck, who displayed this project in a five-month-long exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in 2008, where visitors could respond and display their photos and responses to “What are you?”
“[Fulbeck’s] work is very unique and inspiring, especially as a reminder to why we’re here. He definitely gives a very unique take on multiculturalism and what that movement is,” said Alanah Joseph, a junior majoring in communication. “We need more refreshing teachers [like Fulbeck] who bring energy to the room and inspire people to not be so adamant about the ‘A’ [letter grade], and focus on the learning experience in general.”
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
11.29.11 Empires of the World: The British Empire and the Legacies of Partition
Dr. David Lloyd at The Dornsife Commons panel discussion "Empires of the World"
Part 1:
Part 1:
11.29.11 Empires of the World: The Mongol and Russian Empires, part 1
Dr. Azade-Ayse Rorlich at The Dornsife Commons panel discussion "Empires of the World"
Part 1:
Part 1:
11.29.11 Empires of the World: Introductory Remarks
Dr. Indra N. Mukhopadhyay at The Dornsife Commons panel discussion "Empires of the World"
Featured Artists:
Peter Vu (Coliseum Sketch)
Marc Wolfe (Fight for the Empire Poster)
Featured Artists:
Peter Vu (Coliseum Sketch)
Marc Wolfe (Fight for the Empire Poster)
Monday, November 21, 2011
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Welcome
This blog seeks to create a forum which transforms what the public can learn from the question of empire. Legacies of Empire will be a series of essays and multi-media posts that bring together people from across academic disciplines and institutions. It will also be a workshop where anyone who is interested can share new ideas, speculate, experiment, theorize, and develop works in progress. It will inaugurate an open discussion with several disparate realms of scholarship and thought and reveal to what extent all of those realms of scholarship and thought productively inform the others when the question of empire is explicitly posed to them.
The issues of empire can only be understood through multidisciplinary exchange. Empires themselves are complex historical, economic, cultural, technological, philosophical, and political endeavors. So, although “post-colonial” theory has largely been the domain of literary and cultural studies, to adequately address the legacies of empire, a broad-based, collaborative, and multidisciplinary approach is most appropriate.
Empires bind the story of civilization. From Egypt, Persia, India, Rome, China, and South and Central America, to Britain, France, Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States, imperial formations have spanned ancient and modern history and touched nearly every part of the world. They expand; they dominate; and they crumble. Through their traces, they inform contemporary identities, social formations, politics, languages, customs, and values. Technological, scientific, and medical innovation have all been spurred by various imperial ambitions. Cities, economies, and the natural environment have all been shaped by empires. Untold human suffering and epic human triumphs are intertwined through the immense fabric woven by imperialism, the knots of which are far too numerous for any one scholar to untie.
"Legacies of Empire" hopes to connect literary scholars, historians, classicists, and linguists with specialists in political science, international relations, and economics. Engineers, architects, and urban planners can share their perspective on the technology, designs, and financial structures of empire with anthropologists, epidemiologists, environmentalists, theorists of education, and artists and musicians. These exchanges will hopefully be just the beginning of long and fruitful collaborations that cross-pollinate a vibrant intellectual community.
How do empires come into being? Why do empires fall? What do they achieve? What patterns can we identify across history and region? How does the question of empire allow us to see objects of study in various disciplines in new and different ways?
What legacies of empire are we living with today?
The issues of empire can only be understood through multidisciplinary exchange. Empires themselves are complex historical, economic, cultural, technological, philosophical, and political endeavors. So, although “post-colonial” theory has largely been the domain of literary and cultural studies, to adequately address the legacies of empire, a broad-based, collaborative, and multidisciplinary approach is most appropriate.
Empires bind the story of civilization. From Egypt, Persia, India, Rome, China, and South and Central America, to Britain, France, Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States, imperial formations have spanned ancient and modern history and touched nearly every part of the world. They expand; they dominate; and they crumble. Through their traces, they inform contemporary identities, social formations, politics, languages, customs, and values. Technological, scientific, and medical innovation have all been spurred by various imperial ambitions. Cities, economies, and the natural environment have all been shaped by empires. Untold human suffering and epic human triumphs are intertwined through the immense fabric woven by imperialism, the knots of which are far too numerous for any one scholar to untie.
"Legacies of Empire" hopes to connect literary scholars, historians, classicists, and linguists with specialists in political science, international relations, and economics. Engineers, architects, and urban planners can share their perspective on the technology, designs, and financial structures of empire with anthropologists, epidemiologists, environmentalists, theorists of education, and artists and musicians. These exchanges will hopefully be just the beginning of long and fruitful collaborations that cross-pollinate a vibrant intellectual community.
How do empires come into being? Why do empires fall? What do they achieve? What patterns can we identify across history and region? How does the question of empire allow us to see objects of study in various disciplines in new and different ways?
What legacies of empire are we living with today?
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