Beyond Bias, Binary, and Border: Mapping out the Future of Comparative Rhetoric

Abstract

Using the Confucius Institutes as a representative anecdote to think through a series of incongruities, this essay seeks to map out the future of comparative rhetoric. It reconfigures the terms of engagement through a critique of the etic/emic approach and redefines comparative rhetoric by pivoting toward “facts of usage” and facts of “non”-usage. To close the gap between what we think we know about and can speak for the other and what has to happen in order for us to begin to know about and speak for the other, it further calls for enacting the art of recontextualization as a discursive third, a metadisciplinary stance that helps us become more self-reflexive about our own biases, binaries, and boundaries and more attentive to the increasingly blurred and shifting boundaries between self and other, past and present, and local and global.

Notes

¹For more on the Confucius Institutes, see Hanban's website, http://www.hanban.edu.cnconfuciousinstitutes/node_10961.htm, accessed on 5 January 2013.

²According to David Hall and Roger Ames, the importance of any particular belief or any set of ideologies in a culture depends not on its mere presence, but on whether it is importantly present “in such a way that it significantly qualifies, defines, or otherwise shapes the culture” (xv).

³See, for example, Damián Baca; Baca and Victor Villanueva; Basil Hatim; Carol S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley, Rhetoric Before; Lipson and Binkley, Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics; Michelle Hall Kells, Valerie Balester, and Victor Villanueva; Keith Lloyd; LuMing Mao, Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie; Malea Powell, “Down by the River;” Powell, “Dreaming Charles Eastman;” Susan Romano; Jon Sun-Gi; and Ernest Stromberg.

⁴See, for example, Steven C. Combs; Mary Garrett, “Classical Chinese;” Garrett, “Some Elementary;” Xing Lu, Rhetoric in Ancient China; Lu, “Studies and Development;” Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution; Arabella Lyon, “Confucian Silence;” Lyon, “Rhetorical Authority;” Mao, “Studying the Chinese Rhetorical Tradition;” C. Jan Swearingen; Bo Wang, “‘Breaking the Age;” Wang, “Engaging Nuquanzhuyi;” Hui Wu, “Alternative Feminist Discourse;” Wu, “The Paradigm;” Xiaoye You.

⁵For Johannes Fabian, there exists “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (31)—thus relocating people in a chronological hierarchy rather than in geographical places. Further, the European idea of civilization and Western Europe are touted as a point of arrival.

⁶“Etics” and “emics” are originally coined by the linguist Kenneth Pike from the suffixes of the words “phonetic” and “phonemic” (42). Pike, in coining these terms, intended to “apply a single comprehensive research strategy to language and behavior based on analogies with the concepts and principles of structural linguistics” (Harris 332).

⁷In his introduction to a collection of essays devoted to discussing the status of comparative literature as a discipline, Haun Saussy suggests focusing on the question of how to contextualize and admit new traditions and canons, which will lead us away from “the delusional questions of identity and toward the pragmatic ones, … toward ones such as ‘What we do in comparative literature is … ’” (22).

⁸Alcoff acknowledges the difficulty in distinguishing speaking about from speaking for, both because speaking for others may have to involve “simultaneously conferring information about them” and because speaking about others may be no different from “speaking in place of them, that is, speaking for them” (9; emphasis added). I agree because, as speech acts, both are interconnected and both are parasitic upon each other.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

LuMing Mao

LuMing Mao is Chair and Professor in the Department of English, Room 356E, Bachelor Hall, 301 S. Patterson, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 45056, USA.