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.