The other day, I attended an interesting talk on rhetorical practice in a region and time period that has rarely drawn the attention of U.S. rhetorical scholars and that, in those rare moments, has been dismissed or denigrated by U.S. scholars who take the history of Greco-Roman rhetoric as their universalized frame for understanding and evaluating rhetorical practice in any context.
The speaker gave an in-depth introduction to the inscription practices of hir region/period and suggested that rhetorical study needs to pay attention to the interesting history and practice that came from there/then. Ze also raised the question of whether "Rhetoric" is the proper term to describe the practices ze laid out, given the term's particular foundation in the traditions of Aristotle and the Sophists, in a logo-centric context*, in a history of terms and assumptions.**
Unfortunately, the speaker omitted a perhaps obvious, but incredibly important step in his argument, a step that would have moved his speak away from the paradigm that Virginia Dominguez gently terms the "rescue project" and into the realm of (again, Dominguez) a "politics of love and rescue." That step is to move beyond the impulse of "we should pay attention to this period/place because it's interesting and we haven't paid attention before" and into an argument for why, beyond a recognition of previous neglect, rhetorical studies needs to pay attention. Into, in other words, a direct articulation of what the study of rhetoric gains from such attention, how a change from "history of rhetoric" to "histories of rhetoric" might both challenge and enrich our ability to understand practices of persuasion and identification.
To hir credit, the speaker did ask us to imagine how the study and even the definition of rhetoric would be different if it were hir period, not the Greco-Roman period, that served as starting point. However, ze did not guide us into that investigation, did not lay out for us the contributions that I believe can be made by greater attention to hir region and period.
Because omitting the justification for such expansion in how we in the US think about "rhetoric" feels like a threat to the work that I am doing, I want to take a few moments here to launch a general defense of the study of what might problematically be called 'other' rhetorics. Though I cannot make this argument for the specific region/period covered by the speaker, I believe there are some general reasons for broadening and re-examining our received definitions of rhetoric.
First on my list is the reminder that those of us introducing new regions to the study of rhetoric are not, in fact, doing anything so terribly different from our colleagues who, in recent years, have argued that the "history of rhetoric" ought to include the histories of women, people of color, and the everyday or that definitions of rhetoric should make room for the persuasive, identificatory force of images, space, and culture. These colleagues have argued convincingly that "rhetoric" is diminished by a slavish adherence to the doctrine of the "good man speaking well." They have shown, more importantly, that it never was just the "good man speaking well." What we know as *the* rhetorical tradition is chock full of images and bodies, of women and slaves, of foreigners and interlopers. We cannot, these colleagues argue, understand rhetoric, even rhetoric as we think we know it, if we simply accept the lacunae and erasures that have come to use via long histories of European bias. Similarly, those of us who focus on regions previously neglected (i.e. the vast majority of the globe) can argue that there is no justifiable claim to understanding the "available means of persuasion" if vast traditions of rhetorical practice are summarily ignored. Indeed, even those who remain staunchly committed to the study of "Western" traditions must realize that their traditions are fundamentally influenced by those vast realms of the not-West. As the speaker pointed out, Aristotle was not a European. I would add, Alexandria was not a European locale. Augustine of Hippo was not a European. And, perhaps more importantly, the history of colonialism brought syncretic practices into existence, required the adaptation of rhetorical modes, and influenced key periods of transformation (like the Enlightenment).
In addition (and this point was implicit in the speaker's argument), broader study of rhetoric often gives new and definitive support for arguments suggesting that rhetorical force can be found in a wide array of human practices. Articulating the different means of persuasion and identification at work in a given context can provide new terms for rhetorical theorizing, contributing either new applications of existing terms or contributing new terms for understanding previously unrecognized rhetorical behavior. It is in this context, for example, that I plan sometime to return to Guaman Poma's 1615 "Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno" to study the dialogue on the subject of good government that Poma imagines occurring between himself and the king of Spain. Poma's re-interpretation of a feature of Western rhetorical history (i.e. Alcuin's dialogue with Charlemagne) should offer us important new insight into that tradition and the syncretic rhetorical practice that Poma developed.
Of course, any specific project will carry specific contributions to be articulated. Given the ease with which such efforts to expand the purview of rhetoric can be dismissed as simply "not rhetoric," it is of utmost importance for us to make clear the many ways that a more expansive study of rhetoric strengthens and challenges the field.
*An additional difficulty I had with this talk was its insistence on the heritage of Greco-Roman rhetoric as language-based. The deluge of recent scholarship on the importance of visual artifacts and bodily comportment to ancient ideas of rhetoric ought to remind us that the assumption of the ancients' logo-centrism tells us more about our biases than the actual rhetorical practices of the Greeks and Romans.
**I also had objections to the either/or construct offered here and the underlying assumption that we must either define rhetoric as "big-R" Greco-Roman rhetoric (and thereby find new terms to refer to practices growing from different contexts) or entirely reject the useful terms and histories that US scholars have inherited from Greek, Rome, and Europe in order to make space for a more pluralistic set of rhetorics. I won't go into that larger argument here, but will simply note that while I don't believe that all rhetorical practice can be interpreted using the terminologies that we've inherited from Greece and Rome, I do believe that it would be ridiculous to therefore declare those traditions useless for approaching anything other than ancient Greco-Roman (and perhaps European) rhetorical histories. If we have any claim to the heritage of "available means of persuasion," we ought to be able to conceive of a more flexible approach to rhetoric.
