National Healing: Race, State, and the Teaching of Composition

The Babel Effect

The Bab el Effect Rhetoric is a system of thought for conceptualizing the composing, delivery and reception of discourse. Rhetoric is about work that connects one to another. It is about the composing of the connection. It is also about the claiming of the other’s presence (not in possession; rather, in respect of the other). As Daniel Collins (2001) and Michael Spooner (2002) have both shown us, rhetoric is also about the responsibilities of an audience member or reader and how we make meaning of the other ’s work, the dialogue writer and reader engage in as meaning emerges. The study of rhetoric offers, then, options for composing, for the kinds of texts we could make, and also for the ways we orient ourselves toward the world. Through all of this creating and connecting, rhetoric helps us to address at least some of the limitations of subjectivity. Philosopher Ram Adhar Mall (2004, 315) claims that “There is no pure own culture as there is no pure other culture. The same is true for philosophy.” The same is also true of rhetoric and composition. The Western tradition is certainly and obviously not the only tradition to offer powerful resources for writers and teachers of writing, and there is no reason that we should not be drawing on others. There is no reason for blindly and mistakenly working for a cultural purity in a world of growing interconnection. There is no reason to use our teaching to sanction one, particular, nationalist ideology as if it were universal. Ignorance is little excuse for provincialism when there is so much help available to us when we search for rhetoric’s various traditions and the interpreting of the works of individual rhetoricians. For instance, in Comparative Rhetoric, George Kennedy (1998) has charted the inception of comparative rhetorical studies. In it he offers chapters dedicated to various rhetorical traditions, from China to India to the rhetoric of indigenous people in the Americas, providing useful examples from each tradition along the way. Robert Oliver’s (1971) Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China does much the same thing, with a narrower focus and in greater detail. In the 1990s, compositionists and rhetoricians seeking to understand the Eastern rhetorical tradition often turned to the prodigious and insightful works of David L. Hall The Babel Effect     37 and Roger T. Ames. Their texts, Thinking Through Confucius (Hall 1987), Anticipating China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture (Hall and Ames 1995) and Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture (Hall and Ames 1998); along with Joel Marks and Roger T. Ames’s (1995) edited collection, Emotions in Asian Thought, and Roger T. Ames, Wimal Dissanayake and Thomas P. Kasuklis’s (1994) collection, Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice, all help one to understand the cultural and philosophical implications of the complex relationships among self, communication and society in Eastern thought and rhetoric. In addition, in The Dao of Rhetoric, Steven Combs (2005) explicates ancient Daoist philosophy and then applies the principles he uncovers to the study of contemporary, popular sources, demonstrating, as he does, the possible uses of Daoist philosophy in our work as writing teachers. Xing Lu has explicated how over many centuries ancient Chinese scholars developed a complex understanding of language and philosophy (epistemology and ethics), logic and advising, or ming and bien, literally, naming and argumentation (1998, 4). Her Rhetoric in Ancient China, Fifth to Third Century B.C.E. is filled with specific examples of scholars and the development of Chinese rhetoric, a rhetorical tradition that she chronicles in its modern manifestations, as well, in Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication (Lu 2004). In Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie, LuMing Mao (2006) describes the emergence and significance of Asian American rhetoric for the American scene and the writing classroom. Indeed, in light of the outstanding work of the contributors to LuMing Mao and Morris Young’s (2008) Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric, there can be no mistake that nationalist attempts at cultural purity are bereft of the epistemological vision that is increasingly necessary in writing classrooms: “A deft composer is not truly literate—in fact, remains impoverished—until she has a full understanding of her medium—that is, the local and global contexts of empire that shape the English language and those who use it” (Hattori and Ching 2008, 59). Writing about the research presented by...