Feminist Rhetorical Resilience

Response. On the Politics of Writing Transnational Rhetoric: Possibilities and Pitfalls

R e s P o n s e On the Politics of Writing Transnational Rhetoric: Possibilities and Pitfalls Arabella Lyon and Banu Özel Centered in the ethics of transnational feminism, the struggles of political and economic globalism, and the issues of biopiracy, intellectual piracy, biotechnology, and the patenting of biological life forms, Eileen Schell both introduces and analyzes the rhetoric of Indian environmentalist and scientist Vandana Shiva. In her analysis of Shiva’s work against hegemonic Western science and capital, Schell shows how Shiva deploys eclectic rhetorical traditions, including ecofeminism, transnational feminism, Ghandian principles of nonviolent persuasion, Hindu understanding of noncooperation, confrontational and identification rhetorics as described by Kenneth Burke, and the good old Greek synecdoche . In analyzing the complex global geography of Shiva’s engagement with US-based RiceTec Corporation and its patent of Indian/ Pakistani basmati rice lines and grains, Schell demonstrates Shiva’s flexibility in shifting and contextualizing political debate across immense geopolitical space. Schell’s analysis of Shiva foregrounds the ways in which her improvisations and heterogeneous methods travel across geopolitical and sociocultural boundaries and transform the public sphere, despite the resistance of global capital. It is the richness of Shiva’s undertaking, and thus Schell’s undertaking , that interests us. Shiva’s resilience derives from a blending of Western rhetoric and local and Hindu traditions of speaking. We take this heterogeneous approach as itself a synecdoche for the best rhetorics of transnationalism; in other words, as transnational feminists of the developing world suggest, start with Southern initiation, activism, and understanding, and include only the necessary Western strategies and support. Within this understanding of global commitment, feminist action might be truly transformative or, at least, have some of Shiva’s success in speaking back to the three colonizations of modern patriarchy (nature, women, and the Third World). Vandana Shiva and the Rhetorics of Biodiversity 55 As Schell notes, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan write that Western feminists need to “understand the material conditions that structure women’s lives in diverse locations” if they are to avoid “universalizing gestures of dominant Western cultures” (17). The difficulty of interpreting different worlds and words from a Western standpoint, a position of dominance and privilege, cannot be overly acknowledged. To understand the resilience of women in other cultures, Western scholars must leave their positions to whatever extent possible. Universalizing dangers lurk when one applies Western systems of trope, modernist conceptions of the public sphere, and Kenneth Burke’s theory to the rhetoric and politics of a Hindu, Indian, feminist, self-identified farmer. Even Gandhian rhetoric must be handled with care because, as Ellen W. Gorsevski warns us, Gandhi’s rhetoric allowed him to be seen as a “standin Euro” (xxi) because of his impeccable English. Yet in a world of global education and global Englishes, rhetoric is not limited to the standpoints and traditions within each disparate culture ; transnational movements place the activists and industrialists of many nations in struggle and dialogue, creating a polyphony of traditions , rhetorics, and cultures. Analyzing comparative rhetoric or intermingled and blended rhetorics, as Schell describes Shiva’s mélange, is an intellectually and ethically fraught enterprise. Significantly, Schell exposes some of the junctures, intersections, fragments, and leaps inherent in Shiva’s address to multiple audiences; that is, she reveals the rhetorical diversity necessary for effective speech in a transnational public sphere. Transnational agency entails transnational awareness. Still, we cannot help but wonder what Schell might have seen differently if she had acknowledged the rhetorical traditions of the great Hindu epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, or if she had addressed the work on Hindu nationalist rhetoric, work such as that of Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen or Indian social historian Romila Thapar. If Schell’s purpose is to elucidate the multiple locations from which Shiva speaks, she has erred on the side of Shiva’s West and its rhetorics of modernization. Given the “scattered hegemonies” of our transnational world, rhetorical criticism may be always inadequate to the task. Language exceeds the limits of our understanding, our standpoints. The need for knowledge of “the material conditions” and discursive traditions outside the West are the greatest task of not just our disciplines, but our lives. In recognizing new geopolitical rhetorical spaces and locations, scholars denationalize and denormalize notions 56 FEM I N I ST RH ETORI CA L RESI LI EN C E of rhetoric in ways that are not yet fully understood. By studying...