Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies

Growing Routes: Rhetoric as the Study and Practice of Movement

71 Growing Routes Rhetoric as the Study and Practice of Movement Ilene Whitney Crawford In 2002, I began collecting literacy narratives from postwar generation Vietnamese women in order to understand the ways in which acquiring English is sponsored and compelled by capitalism’s expansion in the third world (see Crawford 2007). At that time, I categorized the project as feminist literacy studies. But I had a rhetorical problem: the tendency I shared with my U.S. audience to freeze Vietnam in time, circa 1975, impaired my ability to work on the terms the physical space of Vietnam offered, and impaired my ability (and that of my readership) to see the future Vietnam my subjects were imagining, a modern nation respected for its intellectual and technological contributions to the world. To learn the lesson of Vietnam—a lesson about the twenty-first century, not the twentieth—I needed to be moved rather than persuaded. I needed to develop a different methodology, one better suited to a project I now think is feminist rhetoric as well as feminist literacy studies, a methodology I call “growing routes.” To be moved, I first had to reconstruct Vietnam as topos. When I began collecting literacy narratives from women living in Ho Chi Minh City (HCM City), the set of images that signified Vietnam to me were more real at times than Vietnam itself; it took some time for my vision to adjust. I had to learn to see—and then learn to remember—a dynamic place with a present and a future that will be shaped more by the rapidly evolving forces of late capitalism than it will be shaped by the legacy of 72 Ilene Whitney Crawford the Vietnam War. Mapping “my” route through Vietnam, a route that turns out to be a well-worn one, demonstrates how the materials that fashion topos are collectively assembled. This seems obvious. It seemed obvious to me too, and I went to Vietnam fully prepared to critically interrogate my perspective; but let me assure you that physically experiencing the power of Vietnam as topos, discovering that you can’t think your way out of walking the streets in a preprogrammed way, really drives the point home. In his discussion of topos, Roland Barthes notes the significance of the “metaphoric approach to place,” citing Aristotle’s claim that “to remember , it suffices to recognize the place.” “Place,” Barthes glosses, “is therefore the element of an association of ideas, of a conditioning, of a training, of a mnemonics; places then are not arguments themselves but the compartments in which they are arranged” (1988, 65). I want to put some pressure on Barthes’s assertion, however. As Frank D’Angelo shows, “topoi became displaced as inventional strategies and embedded in discourse as methods of organizing ideas” between antiquity and modernity , becoming “structural patterns” that bear a “heuristic burden” (1984, 67). Places, topoi, are indeed compartments for arguments. But compartments need to be built, and because they are built they also function as arguments in and of themselves. Vietnam certainly continues to function as a container that shapes arguments about the lessons the late twentieth century has for U.S. status and identity. But what is our cue to make those arguments? How do we recognize Vietnam as the topos that invokes these arguments? Many of us in the United States recognize Vietnam via a select set of codified images and terms. On my first trip to Vietnam in 2002, I traveled with my friend and colleague Thuan Vu. Thuan was returning to Vietnam for the first time after fleeing Saigon in 1975 by boat with his family as a two-year-old. I was not returning to Vietnam; I did not have family who served in Vietnam. But I found that I also “remembered” Vietnam; while not a homeplace for me like it was for Thuan, it was a place I had composed out of a series of very predictable memories, which I later described in this journal entry excerpt: Born in the United States in 1970, my memories of Vietnam take the shape of a frozen-in-time feedback loop of photographs, news footage, and movie scenes that document or reference the Vietnam War: wounded Growing Routes 73 soldiers, napalmed children running down a dirt road, burning villages, and people frantically clinging to the last helicopter leaving the American Embassy, all set to the sound of thumping...