Comparative Rhetoric, Postcolonial Studies, and Transnational Feminisms: A Geopolitical Approach

Abstract

This essay examines methodological practices in comparative rhetoric over the past three decades and suggests that the field conceive new perspectives to engage with transnational spaces, hybrid identities, and subjectivities grounded in differences related to gender, race, class, and culture. Drawing on insights from postcolonial and transnational feminist studies, the author explores the implications of contemporary theories for comparative work and develops an approach that links the cultural specificities of particular non-Western rhetorics with larger geopolitical forces and networks. Through an analysis of early-twentieth-century Chinese women's discourse on nüquanzhuyi, she argues that a geopolitical approach focusing on how rather than what we read would help practitioners rethink history, identity, and the nature of theoretical investigation in the field and set the stage for more nuanced and sophisticated studies of non-Western rhetorics in the twenty-first century.

Notes

¹Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. I am not unaware that some scholars now avoid assumptions about “tradition” because the concept—whether it is conceived as a textual canon or a particular historical and cultural context—can be problematic. Here I use “tradition” to refer to a set of complex, heterogeneous, open-ended, and incomplete discursive practices and cultural formations.

²See George Kennedy and Robert T. Oliver. Although these scholars' work brought attention to non-Western rhetorics, their approaches were confined by the Western notion of rhetoric and argumentation. For a detailed analysis of both scholars' work, see LuMing Mao, “Reflective Encounters: Illustrating Comparative Rhetoric.”

³Sue Hum and Arabella Lyon examine at length Roy and Rowland's inappropriate use of Western methods to discuss Hindu nationalism, which ignores its cultural context.

⁴The italics are my emphasis.

⁵For a discussion of comparative feminist research methodologies, see Bo Wang, “Rethinking Feminist Rhetoric and Historiography in a Global Context: A Cross-Cultural Perspective.”

⁶Hu Ying provides a cogent analysis of Chinese intellectuals' appropriation of fictional Western women characters in constructing the emerging Chinese new woman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

⁷Lydia He Liu defines translingual practice as “a process by which new words, meanings, discourses, and modes of representation arise, circulate, and acquire legitimacy within the host language due to, or in spite of, the latter's contact/collision with the guest language” (26).

⁸Lu Yin , a fiction writer, essayist, and poet, worked as a teacher and professional writer in the 1920s and 1930s. Her work was well received among female readers of her time.

⁹The notion of “third space” is at the center of Bhabha's conception of hybridity as a condition that maintains the ontological ambiguity of cultural difference, as opposed to the epistemological certainty of cultural diversity.

¹⁰ The Ladies' Journal (), founded in 1915, was edited by Wang Yunzhang and published by the Commercial Press in Shanghai. As a major women's journal, it solicited women's contributions and reached women readers across different regions.

¹¹Cheng Hengzhe , a historian, essayist, and social critic, received her master's degree in Western history from the University of Chicago in 1920 and was the first female professor at Peking University. Huang Xinmian , an essayist and editor, founded and edited (The Ladies' Monthly) during the1930s.

¹²See Wu's analysis of Post-Mao women writers. Also see Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang's edited collection on women's public sphere in transnational China.