Oh, so *that's* why they got a little defensive...

One of the main threads of argument in my current project looks at the sedimentary quality of topoi (commonplaces), especially visual topoi. In a not terribly original nor a ground-shaking move, I'm trying to direct attention to something we all already knew: appeals to common sense work because there's been a lot of social meaning (sediment) built up over time around those commonplace appeals. That working-because-of sediment, however, also means that it's hard to redirect topoi, hard to use them in new circumstances for new purposes without them also dragging along their old meaning.

I've explained this idea a few times to Ecuadorian scholars (and, here, I'm meaning both Ecuadorians and scholars of things Ecuadorian) and met with pretty strong resistance. They've reacted negatively to the idea of continuity, insisting that "things are different now."

They're cautions have made me careful to pay attention to both continuity and change, to acknowledge that topoi do change their meaning and have new affects even while arguing that they always also carry the residue of earlier moments. But, I was always sort of surprised by the vehemence of the responses. I guess I should have realized that I was stumbling into a pre-existing conversation (and, if I had really thought about it, I should have remembered something about this particular conversation), but it just didn't hit me.

Until I picked up Jeremy Adelman's edited collection Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American Histories. I had forgotten that "persistence" and "continuity" have been major themes for explaining the "failure" of Latin American states in comparison to their North American, anglo neighbors. There's a long history of saying that colonial legacies, the curse of the "Black Legend"* made the Creoles of the age of revolution unfit to found independent, liberal nations. That the hold-over of colonial practices like the large plantations and hierarchical authority structures, not to mention the colonial relationships between Creoles and indigenous and African populations, meant that Creole elites had no true investment in democracy and, furthermore, were ill-equipped to enter into capitalist economies. The narrative of continuity has often been a deterministic bludgeon for marking Latin America as having failed the modernity test.

Now, Adelman and his co-contributors acknowledge continuity and persistence, but they are interested in how the narrative of continuity itself has become a historical force and how its blanket application to Ibero-America in general obscures the very particular histories and presents of the many Ibero-American republics while also sometimes determining policy of other nations toward Ibero-America.

All of this is a reminder to me of two things:
First, my effort to turn south in order to help US rhetorical scholarship understand more about how rhetoric works will always run into the problem that we North Americans have usually seen the lessons running only the other way, suggesting that Latin America is so different (read, inferior) to us, that we have nothing to learn from them, but they, of course, should learn from us. Part of my writing needs to be directed forcefully against that latent assumption.


Second, my own exploration of topoi in terms of persistence must be complicated. It must not assert a deterministic continuity and must not suggest that continuity is the only appropriate lens for examining Ecuadorian rhetorical practice. If I focus on continuity, then i must also turn to moments of rupture to show how they complicate and re-direct my assertions. As Adelman suggests in his introduction, "continuities, in short, have to contend with the indeterminacies of life if they are to mean anything historically” (12).