While working on the final paper for this course, I didn’t just learn about the various traditions of different cultures, I learned a new way to think about these cultures; one semester later, I believe we have just scratched the surface. One of my first epiphanies came when comparing the Chinese emphasis on memory to our Greek traditions, which also placed a huge emphasis on memorization and repeating things as they were told (memory is one of the five rhetorical cannons after all). I realized, then, that the Chinese emphasis on memory is not a foreign concept at all. Memory is a rhetorical component in both cultures that was maximized in one, but minimized in another.

This has implications beyond even the important revelation that commonalities exist in cultures as vastly different as China and America. Essentially, I realized both that our rhetorical traditions have changed, and that they will continue to change. “The way we do things” is not set in stone, and even if it was, the flow of time would carve new shapes into it just as rivers carve out massive canyons. Our rhetoric will change. We have no power over this. What we do have the power to decide is how it will change. How ought we change, evolve, our rhetorical traditions?

Fortunately, the world is a giant think tank filled with countless ways of doing things. The mentality I arrived at in my work in this course is that cultures should interact with and leave lasting impressions and influence on one another. Cultures should learn from one another. The solutions to our problems in teaching writing to all students, not just minorities, can be found by looking at other cultures. We needn’t replace our own methods, nor should we, but we can build on our foundations finding inspiration in the plethora of ideas and strategies that the world has already provided us with.

This is the frame of mind that I arrived at in my studies, and this is what I believe a truly reflective encounter between two cultures is. How can we both become better from our meeting? The is a seemingly infinite amount of work to be done along these lines, but that means that our potential for growth is just as infinite.

There is little fault to find in Richard Baraniuk’s model of open source education; it is a fleshed out and practical model that I believe will take education in a positive direction. Perhaps the only place where Baraniuk and I disagree is that he seems to think of open source education as a revolutionary new model, while I see it as the natural evolution of our current model.

Baraniuk begins his explanation of the model by having the audience perform a thought experiment in which the free the pages of books from their bindings and transform them into a digital format. He then uses Legos as an analogy for creating customized learning plans from the countless pieces of information that are now available to work with. However, this is not fundamentally different from what we do today, or have done before the internet.

Let us ask, “What is a textbook?” Obviously it is a collection of information centered on a given subject, but where does that information come from? Most textbooks that I am familiar with derive their information from the most widely accepted literature in the field. Essentially, the author has analyzed the information in the field, put it together, and organized it in a way that will help a reader develop a coherent understanding of a topic. Furthermore, university professors add a level of customization on top of this by changing the order in which we read chapters, adding additional reading, and suggesting pairings between texts. I have even seen course packets that contain physical scans of selected readings in one inexpensive binding, which is exactly what Baraniuk describes as the end product.

However, what this new model offers us is a digital infrastructure that facilitates what we are doing to such a degree that we can very well expect a qualitative improvement in education. The Creative Commons license gives us unambiguous sharing privileges, and digitizing our information gives us ease of access and navigation that cannot be matched by a physical library. Furthermore, Baraniuk points out that this will allow us to make connections between seemingly unrelated fields; our current model can do this as well with things as simple as text pairing, but this new model will allow text pairing to occur at a scale that the financial constraints of physical media don’t quite allow.

So, there is no reason to be apprehensive about open source education because it does not overthrow the current textbook regime. It merely pushes the limitations of what our system can do off to a distant horizon.

In Toward Theorizing Japanese Interpersonal Communication Competence from a Non-Western Perspective, Akira Miyahara discusses some of the fundamental differences between Japanese and Western communication. The most important difference seems to be the fact that while the West values individualism, Japan prefers collectivism, and this has had a profound impact on the way we have studied Japanese rhetoric. 

In the west, since we value individualism, we consider a good paper one that clearly asserts the author’s opinion with a strong argument that critically evaluates multiple sources. We teach this to our students as the way to write, and even though we try to “consider the audience,” we do so for the purpose of getting them to listen to and agree with the author. The west’s version of “considering the audience” is a subtle rhetorical tactic, no less assertive and combative than the rest of our rhetoric; in the west, considering the audience is much like building a literary Trojan Horse.

Japan’s collectivist way of thinking, however, has a much different way of considering the audience that permeates into all aspects of society. In Japan, it is considered rude to say anything before first considering how it will impact those around you; they do not even permit talking on cell phones on trains or buses out of consideration for the other passengers. Firmly asserting an opinion and critically evaluating the opinions of others would be considered rude and childish in this culture. Thus, since the Japanese always carefully consider their social position before speaking, it should be assumed that their rhetoric would take a similar form. Instead of expecting a direct assertion from the author, I would expect a piece that seeks to understand certain views that are held by society at large.

So, perhaps the reason why Japanese rhetoric has been historically misunderstood is because they are talking about something totally different. The west likes to talk about I; Japan likes to talk about We.

Dave’s Educational Blog discusses the possible benefits of a rhizomatic pedagogy. He derives the term from a plant with no central body that can grow from any point in any direction, and he believes that education should mirror this model. In a rhizomatic classroom, it is not canonical or authoritative sources that are the sole sources of knowledge, but rather every person in the classroom; in this model, knowledge is a product of communal contributions.

This model seems to be an excellent way of resolving the issues brought up by Bronwyn T. Williams regarding the problem of dominant cultures dominating education. According to Bronwyn, the authority of the dominant culture imposes its norms on the “other” cultures, even if inadvertently, and even when the “other” cultures are engaged, they are often subject to stereotyping and comparison with the dominant culture. The rhizomatic model, however, undermines the notion of authority itself; the value of knowledge is not determined by its point of origin, whether it be a dominant culture or an “other” culture.

Dave points to the modern wiki as an example of how rhizomatic culture works. With encyclopedia websites like Wikipedia, any person, regardless of their qualifications, can add or modify any piece of information and thus contribute to humanity’s collective knowledge. According to Dave, this model sacrifices authority, and gains fluidity and rapidity that cannot be achieved through peer review. Likewise, Dave describes a rhizomatic classroom as one where the curriculum is created by the class through the process of education, not mandated beforehand by an authoritative figure.

While this model, in theory, would seem to allow meaningful conversations and contributions between cultures, the execution of the rhizomatic examples that Dave points to, wikis, reveal that this may not be a perfect, or even a workable solution for the purposes of alleviating the influence of authority. The fact is authority is integral to wiki culture. Wikipedia contains an article rating system and one of the criteria for being rated a “good article” is to have all information cited and backed up by peer reviewed sources. Even in wikis about games and television shows, speculation is not welcome; all information must refer back to the source material. Furthermore, if information is not deemed acceptable, the more active members of the community, which become authority figures simply through enthusiastic policing, eliminate that information.

Unfortunately, based on the real-world examples of the rhizomatic model that Dave mentioned, I do not see this model as a solution to the authority problem, but rather as a way of complicating authority and adding another layer to it. It would be good to think that in a rhizomatic classroom all students, regardless of their culture, have equal contributions to knowledge, but studying wiki culture reveals that loud voices and authoritative sources still dominate.

In Speak for Yourself, Williams uses a postcolonial lens to shed light on and reflect upon an issue that comes up in multicultural classrooms: students with diverse cultural backgrounds must abandon their own customs to conform to the dominant culture’s rhetorical practices. He describes how his pedagogy has evolved over the years to try to rectify this problem, but nonetheless, he finds it difficult to avoid the “colonizer’s gaze” (591). Most notably, he had his students write personal essays about the universal concepts of “family, death, and work,” focusing class discussions not on how the cultures view each concept differently, but rather on why the cultures hold their views (597).

I feel as though this pedagogical strategy in particular comes closest to answering how we ought to examine world rhetorics. If we ask the same question that Williams asks, “Why do these cultures compose in such a way?” rather than simply pointing out how their rhetoric is different from our own. Such questions will begin to reveal the underlying mechanics of other rhetorics, and once we finally comprehend them, then we can begin to analyze them and have conversations between rhetorics.

However, Williams is not satisfied with that answer. He claims that even in these seemingly open conversations, there is still a power hierarchy where the teacher represents a dominant culture evaluating the writing of other cultures, which in turn stifles these conversations. He then goes on to argue that if we truly want to liberate our students, we must have open conversations critiquing the teacher’s position of power and about how the academy “can act as a disciplining force rather than a liberating one” (607).

I agree that it is important to be aware of power dynamics between cultures, and I even think that critiquing the power hierarchy could be a useful discussion, however, I feel as though this piece suggests that we implement a pedagogy that dwells far too much on this mentality, and it also misses a few major points. First and foremost, no matter how creatively you think of ethnic diversity, and no matter what pedagogical approach you take, power hierarchies are inevitable. So long as grades exist, the teacher is in a position of authority, and no matter how much that authority is critiqued, it will not liberate the students from that authority. The only way to actually liberate students from the influence of the dominant culture is to remove the actual authority: the grade.

Second, Williams does not address the fact that adopting and mastering a dominant culture’s practices, can be, and often is, empowering, both for the individual and for the culture they represent. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. masterfully used the rhetoric of a very dominant culture to make indispensable contributions to his race’s empowerment. Is fair to say that his education was a disciplining force in his peaceful protests and speeches? Considering such an example, can learning the rhetoric of a dominant culture empower one’s own culture?

Finally, there seems to be an underlying assumption in Williams’s piece that students who come into the classroom of a dominant culture actually understand their own culture’s rhetoric. Is this a fair assumption? By downplaying the significance of a dominant culture’s rhetoric in a classroom, do we risk producing students who know no rhetorics at all?

The study of world rhetorics appears to be in a nascent state; scholars are just beginning to develop frameworks in which we can have meaningful conversations about pieces of literature across cultures. Levitt and Khagram have done a good job in establishing a concrete framework for transnational studies, unifying a multitude of disjointed scholarly research, and challenging the status quo of Academia by recommending new modes of conducting research (philosophical and public transnationalism). However, the vast majority of scholarly research seems to fall into the empirical category of transnationalism, and even there the field is still evolving.

Mao and Connor both give a survey of the history of comparative rhetoric, the field that studies the way rhetorics function across cultures. Mao begins by critiquing the work of Robert T. Oliver, who conducted a study on Asian rhetorics. Oliver’s goals were to “identify and conceptualize the rhetorical theories and practices of ancient India and China on their own terms,” (403) and he did manage to argue that while their rhetoric does not follow Western traditions it is still inherent in the text, but his work often succumbed to unwarranted generalizations and failed to give a complete analysis of Chinese rhetoric (405-6). In 1998, Xing Lu published a more accurate analysis of Chinese rhetoric that utilized their own terms and successfully pointed out the nuances and complexity of their works (415). The qualitative difference between these pieces shows how the field has evolved, but it also shows that comparative rhetoric is still focusing primarily on empirical transnationalism; there are still issues in even identifying components of other rhetorics.

Connor’s article reveals a similar pattern. She begins by assessing the early work of Robert Kaplan, a founder of comparative rhetoric, and finds that his work was hindered by tendencies towards a deficiency model (495). Connor goes on to describe research that was conducted on rhetoric of various cultures, and again the research stops at identifying features of the rhetoric. And even in those examples, traces of the deficiency model can be seen. For example, Connor describes Finnish rhetoric as having a “delay” before introducing the main topic of a piece (506). This word should not be used if we are to engage with the rhetoric “on its own terms.” There is no delay; the main topic is exactly where it should be for Finnish rhetoric. The only way to arrive at the term “delay” is to look at the rhetoric through a Western lens, which is exactly what comparative rhetoric scholars have been trying to avoid.

So, it seems to me that the first problem that needs to be addressed before any meaningful studies in world rhetoric can be conducted is how to even identify rhetorical components on their own terms. From what I have seen, there is a re-occurring mistake that scholars in the field are making: they are trying to study rhetoric using a theoretical framework that does not yet exist. Chinese rhetoric is not Greek rhetoric, and the two forms do not use the same terms, literally or figuratively. If we think about any other form of rhetoric in terms of our own rhetoric, we will inevitably fall short of properly describing it. Ideally, we would like to analyze all rhetoric using a unified theory of global rhetoric, but such a theory does not yet exist; it is our job to make that theory, and we must first begin by analyzing the components of other rhetorics.

I believe that we must analyze rhetorics on their own before we can compare them, but a major difficulty in the field seems to be just that: we only know how to measure other rhetorics against our own. So, I propose thinking of rhetorics in a similar manner to genre analysis. One does not analyze a research grant proposal in terms of a short story, nor does one complain that a sonnet lacks a thesis. The same should hold true for rhetorics. Just as we are able to identify the textual features of various genres (independently of all other genres), we should be able to identify distinct rhetorical features, much like the way Xing Lu identified the various forms of Chinese speech, independent of all other lenses. Only then can the comparisons begin.