Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies

5. Critical Imagination

71 5 Critical Imagination The best histories strive not to glimpse universality but to locate theories and events in specific historical and material circumstances. . . . The best histories do not tell a single story, leaving out information that does not fit, but stress multiplicity and diversity. —Jane Donawerth, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900 As Royster points out in Traces of a Stream, the use of critical imagination functions as one of several inquiry tools available for developing a critical stance in order to engage more intentionally and intensely in various intellectual processes. The idea is to account for what we “know” by gathering whatever evidence can be gathered and ordering it in a configuration that is reasonable and justifiable in accord with basic scholarly methodologies. The next step is to think between, above, around, and beyond this evidence to speculate methodically about probabilities, that is, what might likely be true based on what we have in hand. For example, in historical work (which we emphasize, again, is our own scholarly focus but not the only area for which such inquiry strategies are relevant), this process involves interrogating the contexts, conditions, lives, and practices of women who are no longer alive to speak directly on their own behalf. We use critical imagination as a tool to engage, as it were, in hypothesizing, in what might be called “educated guessing,” as a means for searching methodically , not so much for immutable truth but instead for what is likely or possible, given the facts in hand. Recasting Paradigms 72 Without the option in these types of inquiries, typically, for more-traditional scientific experimentation and documentation, the goal is to look beyond typically anointed assumptions in the field in anticipation of the possibility of seeing something not previously noticed or considered. We look at people at whom we have not looked before (e.g., women, people from underrepresented minority groups), in places at which we have not looked seriously or methodically before (e.g., women’s organizations), at practices and conditions at which we have not looked closely enough (e.g., in literary clubs, garden clubs, or church auxiliaries), and at genres that we have not considered carefully enough (e.g., women’s organizational records, artifacts from digital culture, and artifacts from visual culture), and we think again about what women’s patterns of action seem to suggest about rhetoric, writing , leadership, activism, and rhetorical expertise. We connect this effort to Geertz’s notion of tacking in and tacking out (Interpretation). Metaphorically, we link “tacking in” to the use of longstanding analytical tools (such as various strategies used for close textual analysis) in order to focus closely on existing resources, fragmentary and otherwise, and existing scholarship to assess what we now understand and to speculate about what seems to be missing. We associate “tacking out” analogically with the technologically enhanced ability to view the Earth from satellites in outer space in order to gain the capacity to see, for example, that rivers, long since dry or shifted, once flowed—a “traces of a stream” metaphor in the extreme. To tack out, then, we stand in conscious awareness of what we have come to know by more-traditional means and from that base use critical imagination to look back from a distance (from the present into the past, from one cultural context toward another, from one sociopolitical location to another, and so on) in order to broaden our own viewpoints in anticipation of what might become more visible from a longer or broader view, where the scene may not be in fine detail but in broader strokes and deep impressions. Examples Tacking In The shift in practice here is a shift in the commitment to engage dialectically and dialogically, to actually use tension, conflicts, balances, and counterbalances more overtly as critical opportunities for inquiry in order to enable a conversation, even if only imaginatively, and simulate an interactive encounter with women who are not us, that is, the women whom we study. We go back and forth between past and present, their worlds and ours, their priorities and our own, local analyses and more-global ones, doing all Critical Imagination 73 with the cautionary tale that a core value is an ethos of humility, respect, and care.1 One of the most-ambitious goals in enacting this ethos of care within this context, however, is connected neither to the past nor the present...