Signs of Struggle: The Rhetorical Politics of Cultural Difference (review)

Thomas R. West's Signs of Struggle synthesizes emergent ideologies from the umbrella of rhetorical studies found in English, cultural studies, speech communication, and writing studies to redirect modern-day discussions of cultural difference. West's theoretical meta-amalgamation, including Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Mary Louise Pratt, and bell hooks (to name just a few), produces a significant challenge to the neopolitics of multiculturalism, masculine heterosexuality, and colorblind assertions emanating from the status quo. West believes that now, during the rapid and intense social transformations of modern globalization, is the time for a rewriting of cultural differences that is dependent on social contexts and power relations to generate an understanding that these differences are signs of struggle.

For West, an assistant professor at the University of South Alabama, the celebration of diversity that merely acknowledges difference has led to the comodification, management, and co-option of difference that limits the latitude of issues under discussion. West claims that the dominant promotion of multiculturalism (liberalism) and colorblindness (conservatism) excuses power and history from parameters of discussion in favor of a "harmonious, empty pluralism" (2). This hollow veneer endorses a philosophy of tolerance that simply endures our differences rather than producing a dialectical spark for co-constituted social relations that has the potential to produce real, ongoing change. West contends that our inquisitive rhetorical eye should be redirected to the emotions that embody the formation of differences as central to understanding and rewriting the scripts that define dominant and subaltern publics. West sets out to articulate a rhetorical politics that fosters the gravity of difference—accepting and engaging differences on their own terms, and positing a guideline for viewing community as an assemblage of "compositions of difference" (3).

The buzzwords "tolerance" and "diversity" often fail to expose the power of difference as a tool for maintenance of the status quo. The celebration and toleration of differences mask the role these differences have played in the "formative historic roles in the ranking of human subjectivities, the significant ways groups of people have posited themselves as better—more advanced, more civilized, more reasonable—than other groups" (4). Differences are not produced through biological or cultural machinations, but rather emerge through the social struggles for power.

West conceives of critical negotiation as the lens for uncovering the burdens of difference in chapter 1. Critical negotiation moved away from consensus and accommodation as the goal to create a sense of unease that "highlights not only the (re)formation of meaning and subjectivity during moments of social and political interaction but one that also takes into account the role and effect of emotion during these moments" (15). This repositioning of negotiation was dependent on Bhabha's call for the deployment of "hybridity as a deliberate strategy to upset perilously settled social identities" (16). Cultural constructions, such as race, produce monologic identities, and a dementia of sameness, which hybridization exploits in those "in-between moments of social and linguistic translation [as a way] to think of resistance as an act of agency rather than as mere reaction" in its negotiation of cultural codes (18). Thus, this critical negotiation of hybridity seeks to: (1) understand the role and effect of emotion in cultural struggles, (2) recognize the co-constitutive process of negotiation, (3) realize that power relations are perceived before the effects of negotiation, and (4) identify that negotiation is situated within its larger social and historical contexts. Ultimately, West contends that such negotiation could serve as the impulse to challenge the status quo.

Chapters 2 and 3 provide two social paradigms that oblige a critical negotiation: race and gender. Multiculturalism's accommodation of diversity fails to dissect the historical precedent that roots differences and the struggle for power inherent in the construction of difference while reinforcing our entrenched beliefs. For West, making a little room for other voices in the dominant canon and institutions of difference has left...