Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric's Historical Narrative
Karma R Chávez
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Abstract
In this paper, the author reconsiders the historical narrative of Rhetorical Studies as a citizenship narrative and thus argues that much rhetorical theory works to uphold the value and ideal of citizenship, while often ignoring or reframing appeals that challenge the very bases of citizenship and the nation-state. This account of Rhetoric’s intellectual history reveals the very parameters for what deserves attention in disciplinary history. The author suggests that this account also reveals the necessity to break from that history, not in order that Rhetoric become more inclusive but so that Rhetoric may be something entirely different, something constituted through non-normative, noncitizen, non-Western perspectives and ways of knowing and being.
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Key takeaways
- But even in those cases, many of which explore how the marginalized petition the State for recognition or redress, the study of rhetoric in the main is the study of people appealing to/for citizenship.
- They have implicitly and explicitly privileged citizens' rhetorical practices and the rhetorical practices of citizenship.
- This point is especially salient in Rhetoric since its history is a citizenship narrative.
- Flores' "Creating Discursive Space through a Rhetoric of Difference," published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, has been cited more than 100 times in the field, a feat that is unmatched by any other essay by a Latin@ rhetoric scholar.
- The use of slave women's narratives opens the way for alternative rhetoric and epistemologies, transforming rhetorical possibility.
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In the process of delegitimating the master narratives that have sustained Western civilization in the past, Postmodernism provoked a "crisis in narrative" which Francois Lyotard describes as narrativity that presents a sense of loss but not of what is lost. Recent histories of rhetoric have promulgated the view that rhetorical maps never reflect a neutral reality, but despite attempts at objectivity, unavoidably reflect the writer's perspective. Fortunately, rhetorical scholars of every stripe are involved in various re-tellings and remappings of rhetorical history, all acknowledging the political nature of their work and the biases mined in their own rhetorical territory. In particular, the recent body of historiography in which feminist researchers recover and recuperate women's contributions to the broad history of culture-making constitutes a new, more scenic excursion into the history of rhetoric. By following the arguments set forth by Joan Wallach Scott,Thomas Laqueur, Anne Fausto-Sterling, and others, (that culture and gender are overlapping, symbiotic, mutually imprinting, ever-evolving categories) it is possible to more accurately chart and account for those gendered limits and powers that lie on the borders of rhetorical history. As the histories of rhetoric are retold a new frontier is crossed. But it is well to be wary, for narratives of gender analysis can harbor the same overly grandiose and totalizing concepts as those now-disputed "grand narratives" of old to which Lyotard refers. (Twenty-eight references and two illustrations are attached.) (SAM)
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I wish to thank many people for their support and assistance in the writing of this thesis. I would like to thank my supervisor, Kate Lilley, for her advice, encouragement, and detailed and constructive comments on my work. I am indebted to her for providing the intellectual environment in which I was able to develop an eclectic and interdisciplinary thesis. I thank Melissa Hardie, who was a helpful acting supervisor, and valuable discussant throughout, and Dr Margaret Rogerson and Dr Adrian Mitchell for their assistance. Meaghan Morris has given me tremendous support and sage advice over this period and I thank her also. I wish to thank my parents, John Docker and Ann Curthoys, for their tremendous intellectual and emotional support over a long period. I could not have done this thesis without them. I feel special gratitude to Sarah Irving for all her love and inspiration over the critical latter stages of this project. Jane Bennett and Bill Connolly provided stimulating and timely suggestions, and were generous hosts during my research on Hannah Arendt in the United States. I thank Desley Deacon for her friendship and her abiding interest in my ideas. Many people have played a role in bringing this thesis about, through their friendship, conversation, and feedback. I would like to thank Alex Wolfson for our long friendship, his good humour and support. I thank my good friend Zora Simic for reading and providing insightful commentary on sections of the thesis and Monique Rooney for her continuing assistance. Many thanks to Dirk Moses, who has consistently provided me with research materials and enthusiastic intellectual conversation, and to Marina Bollinger, who has been an enthusiastic participant in discussions about rhetoric, and has greatly contributed to my historical approach.
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