Local, Global, Glocal Knowledge(s)?

In “Reconstructing Local Knowledge,” Suresh Canagarajah explains how the concept of “local knowledge” has been historically and ideologically perceived in different disciplines, including Rhet/Comp. Throughout the essay, Canagarajah expounds on the history of prejudice that has surrounded the term, essentially attributing it to a binary ideological context that tends to favor more widely adopted value and rhetorical systems in detriment of localized types of knowledge-making frameworks, often associated with specific cultural traditions, and, as a consequence, considered anachronistic and limited in their scope of influence.

Canagarajah addresses a very important issue right at the beginning of the essay: what is essentially knowledge and who is responsible for defining this concept? He starts by tracing the evolution of the expression “local knowledge” throughout different types of discourse – anthropological, social, academic, professional – and points out the fact that, in all of them, local knowledge is perceived as “context bound, community specific, and nonsystematic” (244). For that reason, local knowledge tends to be perceived as inferior, irrational or unreliable by many, often associated with superstitions, myth and backward traditions that no longer seem to have a place in the current landscape. However, as he argues, this perception is created by those who hold political, ideological and, most importantly, discursive power, often smothering the small yet distinct voices of local populations. For Canagarajah, European cultures, through modernist ideals and colonialist practices, were responsible for the suppression of local cultural specificities, as they “refused to acknowledge that the divergent cultural practices of other communities could have a parallel life of equal validity,” thus attempting to assimilate them into what they believed to be “the right way” to do things or “the right type of knowledge” (245). As a consequence, Canagarajah argues, all forms of local knowledge were simply subjected and replaced by another form of local knowledge (246).

It is interesting to see, particularly in this essay, how the notion of knowledge and its dissemination do not seem to have changed much in the last couple of centuries. As Canagarajah argues, despite of the fragmented and fragmentary nature of postmodernist thought and the technological success in channeling local voices into the dominant discourse of the West, there seems to remain an unbalanced power relationship, as local identities are only ever shown through the lens of the dominant culture, which tends to construe them as static artifacts rooted to a specific time and place. As he points out, even local scholars have to resort to Western rhetorical tools in order to study and understand local specificities (250). The world of academic publishing also helps perpetuate the dominance of Western discourse, since “[t]he prestigious journals in almost every discipline are published in the English language and from Western locations” and periphery scholars often lack the resources and networks to produce their own publications (254). Local communities should instead be perceived as “relational and fluid construct[s]” that have their own idiosyncrasies and internal tensions, and, most importantly, that are constantly changing. Many of them, as the author points out, have even become transnational, as they have taken and kept their traditions alive elsewhere, occupying new physical and virtual borders, and thus questioning the dominant claim that local knowledge is geographically static (249).

Canagarajah calls, then, for new rhetorical and cultural practices that allow dominant and local discourses to negotiate their existence on an equal footing (251). The twist, he argues, is we should position ourselves not on the side of Western rhetoric (as has been case so far), but on the side of local knowledge(s). This requires a double process of deconstruction and reconstruction of both the dominant form of discourse and the local forms of knowledge: not only must we question and look for the gaps in the established knowledge, but we also need to interpret and reinterpret local knowledge as it changes, paying attention to its uniqueness while, at the same time, recognizing its limitations (252-253). For this purpose, it is necessary that we provide the means and outlets for local scholars to participate, as well as new modes of presentation that integrate the types of discourse in which these scholars are better versed (or that are particular to a specific form of local knowledge) (255).

While Canagarajah’s words are encouraging, there is still the logistic problem of how we can go about doing it. As other authors have discussed, this is a matter of breaking a centuries long cycle of the West’s ideological and rhetorical domination. How can we bring local discourse into the global – if there is such a thing as global discourse, since it is, essentially, just another type of local discourse? Do we have the tools to fully examine, understand and use these local rhetorics interchangeably with Western discourse?