The Lacuna

          Writing this WO was a personal exercise in searching for an unwritten story. I traveled through brilliant discussions of rhetorical sovereignty, literacies, and codices this past week.Villanueva, Lyons, and Baca gather threads from repositories of memory, history, and rhetoric to weave a narrative of "self". Whether they examine the rhetorical model of amoxtli or the sites of rhetorical sovereignty, they attempt to authentically represent the essential nature of their people and themselves. Lyons in "Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?" begins the essay with a story about the forced assimilation of Indians through boarding school. After exploring the meaning of the Western texts to those first students on that first day of school, Lyons asks the question at hand: "What do Indians want from writing? Certainly something other than the names of white men sewn to our backs" (449). Not only does Lyons move smoothly between this story of American Indians to the rhetorical question at hand, he does so with the confidence and dexterity of someone who firmly believes that the history of American Indians has a place in rhetorical study. Lyons then moves on to define "sovereignty" in terms of rhetoric and in terms of the history of American Indian treaties. The history of the term sovereignty in the American Indian context is necessary to understanding a rhetorically urgent query - where can a nation-people find rhetorical sovereignty not in terms of power relations and contracts, but as a method of self-preservation and cultural respect?  

          His confident moves in weaving this narrative does not only stem from an obvious principle that all people should have representation in the field; I think it also stems from the fact that other scholars have written about American Indians sufficiently enough for a conversation to even exist. It is true that "composition and rhetoric literature of the past few years shows a growing interest in American Indians and a general concern for including Native knowledges and voices in classrooms and curricula," and while Lyons  takes issue with the misrepresentations and cultural appropriations of George Kennedy and Bruce Ballenger in their writings about American Indians, he still has literature directly within the field he can work with in order to situate the article in context (458). Even further than that, Lyons has a rich source of American Indian history, which is documented and studied, on which he can rely to make his arguments.

          The reason why I highlight these qualities in Lyons' text is because I realized, after reading and rereading all the essays from this week trying to write my WO, why I felt slightly disconcerted. I will continue using Lyons as my example, though I emphasize that this feeling persisted with each of the texts. Despite being firmly on Lyon's side throughout his article - meaning, despite my strong belief in his cause and my empathy toward the plight of American Indians due to colonialism - I could not fully be on his side. What would happen if I were to write an article on American Indians in the future? Would I fall into that same category of privilege that Kennedy and Ballenger fall into for Lyons? I do not have that direct personal access to knowledge about American Indian history and culture that Lyons has; my affective interest in studying American Indians could never be on the same level as his affective interest. And my work toward writing about it may be misconstrued. Considering the fact that a majority of work on minority rhetorics is conducted from very personal points of view and from personal experience (that being a championed model of fighting oppression), it seems that writing about the experiences of minorities different from my own is an unlikely route for me to take as I pursue rhetorical study. 

          This brought me to my next question: if I cannot comfortably speak to the experience of other minorities within minority rhetorics, am I limited to exploring the rhetoric of South Asian Americans? Is this even a fair dilemma? As long as I observe the rhetorical urgencies and situations of minorities with an empathetic eye, could I still write about other minorities? I'm not sure I have the answers to these questions. I hope to figure this out eventually. 

          But I digress...I began by talking about unwritten stories. As I was thinking about South Asian Americans in rhetoric, I decided to do some digging and see what I could find in the field about Indians (the other kind, from India) and their rhetorics. 

There was almost nothing. 

          I could not find rhetoricians who took up the cause of exploring the Indian literacies and rhetorics in America. I found other articles, however, about health and sociological related phenomena on Indians; in other words, these articles which focused solely on Indians were in unrelated fields. And the focus was never truly on rhetoric or literacy, but about the racial/sociological/political/literary dynamic of the Indian diaspora in ways that were not rhetorically focused. These sources also did not give the sense that any thorough documentation of Indians in America even existed. Most resources were like The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience by Meena Alexander, which was written in 1951. The sources were outdated, or only focused on specific, centralized diasporic events or activities. Nothing comprehensive - nothing nearly like Lyons thorough overview of race relations between American Indians and white colonialists.

I tried searching for postcolonial and critical race theory, where there was some (but not much) literature. There is of course Can the Subaltern Speak? by Gayatri Spivak, but she recontextualizes outward to critique the behavior of all Western interactions with subalterns; her work is not about Indians really very particular, and not those in America. There is The Karma of Brown Folk (and other books) by Vijay Prashad, whom I did not know about (but now plan on studying). He was the only other major theorist. There was also a promising journal about South Asians called the South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ, which in Hindi means "society at large"); however, the journals focuses on Indians in India, and not diasporic Indians. My findings, in short, were haphazard and disjointed at best. No one had done the work of weaving them together.

          Considering the well-established (and growing) presence of Indians in America, it struck me as very, very odd that I could find so little on the subject specifically within rhetoric. This is likely the main source of my discomfort with the readings - I could not personally relate. I could only extrapolate, or situate myself alongside the readings; but I could not build a direct pathway, or engage within the readings. Lyons was convincing - but I was not reading something to which I could directly plug in my own experiences as a minority. On a basic level of difference, South Asian Indians don't seem to search for sovereignty like American Indians do. 

         Lyons writes within a network of shared and documented histories and conversations related directly to his people's experience in America. South Asian academics, the very few of us who are in the humanities, do not have that luxury. The work of building that kind of space just hasn't been done yet.

          There is an unwritten story here. Perhaps the study of South Asian rhetorics does not mean being confined; actually, serious work needs to be done. And, for the time being, if I should remain within certain comfortable boundaries of academic inquiry out of respect for other cultures, I'm not in such a bad place. Lyons, Baca, Villanueva, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and others all worked with what they knew best; they told the stories which made sense to them. 

It seems there's a fresh story to tell. I could be well-poised to tell it. 

Writer In Process

What does DeJoy mean when she says that we must move from "mastery to analysis" in "I'm a Process Model Baby"? What is her beef with "products," and how they work within process-model theories of composition? I dived into DeJoy with the unpleasant task of sifting through academic jargon to figure it out. 

A digression - I invite you to look at this sentence: 

"Another set of issues arises if we consider this configuration of product in relation to the equally widespread process-model ideology, which asserts that the model represents a recursive process, one in which any stage can, in theory, send us to any other stage of the writing process in infinitely unrestrained ways - although the demands of deadlines, due-dates, and other 'external' concerns may limit us in practice." 

This sentence was 5 lines long in the article. Why couldn't she just say that the other common idea she wants to highlight is the theory that each stage of the writing "process" could lead to other stages of that process, whether forward or backward? She also ended her sentence with an afterthought, and it moves away from her main point. I felt like I was drowning in her language throughout the article. Is it so hard to give-up formal academic writing in favor of clarity? 

Maybe asking for that is like asking an alcoholic to quit drinking cold turkey...

Just some thoughts.
End digression.

After floundering about between pages 166 and 168 for a while, I found a sandbar 0r two.

The first one:  

"The tangle becomes understandable if we consider that...'product' refers not only to a certain kind of text but also to a certain way of reading...what Louise Rosenblatt named the 'efferent stand,' one that 'makes reading...a process of deriving correct answers...an approach whose aim is not audience participation but audience persuasion" (166, emphasis added by me). 

DeJoy does not want readers to mutely master the texts - she wants readers to be situated as participants with the texts. Products are designed for consumption, not use, acquisition instead of action. If texts are designed like products, then audiences are presumed to have the blind faith of baby birds waiting for food to fall out of the sky. We sit here to be persuaded, to accept the answers given by texts.

But really quick...what does "efferent" mean, exactly? The Internet helped on this one...It's an anatomical term which refers to any vessel or carrier in the body that is bringing substance away from the center. It describes a conduit which flows -away- from the source. So the 'efferent stand' of reading products seems to say that the audience is outside the center, and the text conducts meaning from that locus to our hungry minds. 

So, I deduce that DeJoy wants to stop that one-way directional flow. She finds it problematic that audiences read and are persuaded - they do not read and analyze. We master texts, gobble them up. The movement needs to be from mastery to analysis.

Okay...how do we do that? 

Here's my second sandbar:

"The move from mastery to analysis is not just about dramatic changes in how we read; it is also about revaluing texts that put into question the claims of process-model theory and the activities for writing that they assert as universally applicable. It is about putting two texts such as Aristotle's Rhetoric and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own next to each other and asking questions such as 'In which text is a writer more overtly in process?' and 'In which text does process more overtly stand as a vital mode of production for the work of the author?' And it is about admitting that there are obvious ways in which we must respond that, at levels of analysis and practice, Woolf wins out (pp. 167, emphasis on the end added by me). 

She goes on to challenge us to compare Audre Lorde and Kinneavy to see who wins out in the process battle...but more on that later.

DeJoy is interested in having us read authors who are obviously in process. She does not agree with texts being structured as "products" for consumption.

But what does that look like? I have read A Room of One's Own and many texts by Audre Lorde, and the stark difference between those texts and say, Aristotle or Kinneavy, is indeed really obvious. I instinctually understand what DeJoy is getting at, especially when she mentions that we "learn little to nothing about Aristotle's or anyone else's process...Aristotle's Rhetoric positions mastery of the system itself and one's audiences as the end of writing, while Woolf discusses master as a physical place that is systematically made unavailable to specific parts of the population." (167). 

Perhaps I understand her even better when she says that writers like Kinneavy and Aristotle are using "systems where enthymemic logic, identification, and mastery of the advantages of preconstructed cultural assumptions rule over invention" (168). Their works muster that imperative to know, and to control knowledge. They want us to make certain assumptions. They depend on the logic of the age so that their audiences can learn their ideas by rote. We are left in the dark about the process by which they arrived at their conclusions. The blunt force trauma of mastery subdues all readers who grapple with those texts. I would argue DeJoy herself, with her heavy academic jargon and formality, similarly pushes audiences to be persuaded. 

In the spirit of DeJoy's challenge that we place Kinneavy alongside Lorde, I decided to conduct a litmus test to see if DeJoy still rang true after reading both authors.

A sample from Kinneavy's "Introduction to the Modes of Discourse":

     "This book is intended to be a sequel to Aims and Audiences in Writing. In the earlier book attention was given to the various purposes for which we write. The types of aims which control basic strategies of communication as well as organizational techniques and matters of style are considered in the earlier book. The authors hope that various adaptations of thinking processes, organizational patterns, and stylistic differentiations are called for if one attempts to persuade or inform or prove a thesis or convey information or make a poem, etc. One single blanket strategy cannot be applied to all indiscriminately."

BOOM. It's a product, through and through. He admits it himself! Sentence 1 - the book is a sequel, a product derived from another product. It is hoped that the book will be used to make more products - "to persuade or inform or prove a thesis or convey information..." The text is intended as a conduit conveying information to hungry readers so they may be persuaded (satiated?), and afterwards there will hopefully be more products which also persuade. I also see that he expects readers to master his text - how else would we make other products and texts from his? Furthermore, the text itself is a mastery of the discussion of modes in discourse; strong language, formal, with the author the autonomous bearer of knowledge, demonstrates that mastery. On both literacy and textual levels, then, Kinneavy is "product oriented". DeJoy's criticisms fall heavily on him. It's a tough blow to Kinneavy, I must admit.

Lorde, on the other hand, makes her path by walking it. It's an affect which, I think, develops like a good story, unwinding before us as we take a walk through it. Paragraphs lack that imperative push of knowing, that exigence of logic where premise lays heavily upon premise. Lorde's words feel more like revelations which unfurl with curiosity and care. Instead of usurping the "advantages of preconstructed cultural assumptions" to create palatable products, much like Woolf she demonstrates how we question those assumptions. We therefore see both her process and her product simultaneously.

A sample from Lorde's "Transformation of Silence into Language and Action": 

     "Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.
     For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.
     And it is never without fear -- of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective." (43)

I see the moves Lorde makes in her writing - it's as if I'm pondering life's brevity and the importance of silence alongside her. While her ideas are clear, she does not seem to be moving from a center outwards - rather, she meanders within a loosely marked out territory in which several interrelated ideas are brought into play. Kinneavy does no such thing. Kinneavy wants us to believe him; he exhibits a sense of control over where the audience goes with his thoughts. His words have specific instructions and manifestations. Lorde still urges us toward action, but her words are interspersed with musings, revelations, and personal experiences. It champions what DeJoy would call a "feminist model" for process. 

I see what DeJoy means by moving away from mastery, and moving into analysis. 

It seems I reached dry land after all...