Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: The Making of Chinese American Rhetoric - Couverture souple

Mao, Luming

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0874216400 ISBN 13 : 9780874216400

Editeur : Utah State University Press, 2006

Synopsis

LuMing Mao offers an important discussion of the rhetoric of Chinese American speakers, which has wide implications for the teaching of writing in English and for our understanding of cross-cultural influences in discourse.

    Recent scholarship tends to explain such influences as contributing to language hybridity---an advance over the traditional "deficit model." But Mao suggests that the "hybridity" approach is perhaps too arid or sanitized, missing rich nuances of mutual exchange, resistance, or even subversion. Working from Ang's concept of "togetherness in difference,"  Mao suggests that speakers of hybrid discourse may not be attempting the standard (and failing), but instead may be deliberately importing cultural material to create a distance between themselves and the standard. This practice, over time, becomes a process that transforms English, enriching and enlarging it through the infusion of non-Western discourse features, subverting power structures, and even providing unique humorous touches.

    Of interest to scholars in composition, cultural studies, and linguistics as well, Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie leads in an important new direction for both our understanding and our teaching of English.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

LuMing Mao is associate professor and director of graduate studeis in the department of English at Miami University. He teaches and researches Chinese and European American rhetorical traditions, Chinese American rhetoric, linguistics, pragmatics, and writing in multicultural spaces.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

READING CHINESE FORTUNE COOKIE

The Making of Chinese American RhetoricBy LUMING MAO

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-640-0

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Thinking through Paradoxes...................................................................................................11 Opening Topics: Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie..........................................................................................112 Face to Face: Chinese and European American.............................................................................................363 Indirection versus Directness: A Relation of Complementarity............................................................................604 Terms of Contact Reconfigured: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ("Shu" or "Reciprocity") Encountering Individualism.....................875 From Classroom to Community: Chinese American Rhetoric on the Ground.....................................................................1236 Closing Comment: Chinese Fortune Cookie as a Topic Again.................................................................................144Notes......................................................................................................................................151References.................................................................................................................................167Index......................................................................................................................................176

Chapter One

OPENING TOPICS

Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie

Chineseness becomes an open signifier, which acquires its peculiar form and content in dialectical junction with the diverse local conditions in which ethnic Chinese people, wherever they are, construct new, hybrid identities and communities. Nowhere is this more vigorously evident than in everyday popular culture. Thus, we have the fortune cookie, a uniquely Chinese American invention quite unknown elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora or, for that matter, in China itself. (Ang 35) As a descriptive catch-all term, "hybridity" her se fails to discriminate between the diverse modalities of hybridity, for example, forced assimilation, internalized self-rejection, political cooptation, social conformism, cultural mimicry, anal creative transcendence. (Shohat 110)

I pause and struggle already-even before I start-over how I should proceed or in what forms I should present my thesis and advance my argument. Should I situate myself right away in European American rhetorical tradition where I assume a direct, logical, and agonistic persona-so that I can stand a better chance of being recognized, understood, and eventually accepted? Or should I enact and adopt, not a minute too soon, some other rhetorical approaches or tropes that are not informed by, or implicated in, the directness paradigm or the ideology of individualism? More specifically, can I present my arguments, say, with indirection, in small increments over time and/or through repeated analogy and allusion? Or can I completely do away with subheadings within each of my chapters and keep other transitional signposts to a minimum so as to gesture toward high-context communication (Hall 79)? Or can I even try some other strategy, say, by throwing in some Chinese along the way, or by flouting, as I have already done in the title of this book, some grammatical convention in English in order to create togetherness-in-difference? As I reflect upon these questions, upon the opposing opportunities these questions imply, I find myself somewhat being sucked into, or involuntarily re-inscribing, a discursive dichotomy-one that I very much want to reject, and replace with this project at hand. Can I, therefore, develop a narrative that moves away from this shadowy dichotomy and that serves as another living example of Chinese American, rhetoric? Is it rhetorically appropriate, in other words, to try to define and articulate an object of study (i.e., the making of Chinese American rhetoric) with a narrative that is inextricably infused with and deliberately constituted by the same object?

My apprehension and my hesitation are not without merit, I am afraid. Not only because I am acutely mindful of my own space-in both its literal and metaphorical sense-where different traditions and competing voices cannot help but speak and listen to each other within some highly asymmetrical relations of power, but also because I cannot shake off the dire warning Pratt gives in her "Arts of the Contact Zone," of the indeterminate, often perilous, status that can be the fate of such narrative (37). The stakes are high, and the consequences are huge. However, like Hall and Ames (Anticipating China 119), I know I may never "get it right," but I also know that I cannot let this realization stop me, and that I cannot let my own apprehension or hesitation handicap my action, stifle my narrative. In short, I must "get on with it" even as I continue to pause, to reflect, and to persuade.

It is perhaps not surprising to see emergent discourses trying to define themselves in terms of their uniqueness in relation to other, already-established discourses. Such effort, to a large extent, is in response to a traditional demand for identification, for a stable system of reference that serves as signs of discrimination and distinction. Emergent discourses that secure their uniqueness from this kind of internal coherence help counter potential skepticism and remove miscomprehension or incomprehension. They create a sense of authenticity and authority when they begin to be heard and listened to as unique discourses-though, it must be stated, such discourses are not necessarily equal in discursive value to other competing or more dominant discourses. Before too long, hopefully, they could achieve stability and identity-both of which seem essential if emergent discourses want to shed the status of being "emergent" and to secure the status of an established discourse. The question, then, becomes this: Should the making of Chinese American rhetoric exhibit this idealized growth pattern or follow this uncomplicated teleological trajectory? Put in a slightly different way, should Chinese American rhetoric be expected to demonstrate, or to be constituted by, what I call "uniqueness-qua-coherence?"

Definitions of rhetoric vary relative to, for example, historical periods and social and technological contexts-not to mention rhetoricians' own ideological and ethnic commitments. In this global context of ours, rhetoric, for me at least, represents the systematic, organized use and study of discourse and discourse strategies in interpersonal, intercultural contexts, reflecting and reinforcing rhetoricians' own ideology, their own norms of discourse production and discourse consumption, and their ability to persuade, to adjust, and to realign. In light of this definition of rhetoric, one may want to devise for Chinese American rhetoric a core set of discursive features that could be viewed as internally coherent and that could be realized by different forms of enunciations or representations in particular contexts and practices. In other words, one may expect Chinese American rhetoric to be able to show its own unique characteristics-that are consistently different from other rhetorical traditions and from their corresponding manifestations-in order for it to achieve both visibility and viability. For example, Chinese American rhetoric, whatever discursive features it may end up commanding, must be Chinese American enough so that it can be coherently differentiated from, say, African American rhetoric or Native American rhetoric.

The process of differentiation, unfortunately, is never an innocent one: it always embeds a likely risk of differentiating one tradition according to or in relation to the norm of some other tradition. In light of our recent experiences, the latter regularly turns out to be more recognized, more dominant, and it is invariably aligned with the powers-that-be. It is not unusual at all, as a result, to find out that such a norm enjoys a wider circulation and a longer disciplinary canonization. In fact, to all intents and purposes, it is the widely circulated, the perennially canonized that persistently serves as the interpretive example of general applicability in spite of its apparent unmarkedness. One conceivable outcome from this kind of differentiation and evaluation is a body of knowledge that, however coherently distinct, reproduces this hierarchical relationship or this existing order of discoursee Ironically, of course, it is this existing order of discourse that emergent discourses are purported to challenge and transform in the first place-so much so that it can become both possible and viable to think and communicate outside such an order, outside its (largely invisible) discursive rules and categories.

My effort to conceptualize Chinese American rhetoric without reverting back to the dominant tradition as its measuring norm coincides with, and in fact draws inspiration from, a growing number of projects that aim to articulate and to conceptualize emergent ethnic rhetorics as sites of difference, as transformative practices, and as viable alternatives to the oft-invisible, but no less dominant, European American rhetoric. These projects are predicated more on their own terms than on the terms of European American rhetoric, or on the terms of what Glenn calls "the male-dominated and male-documented rhetorical tradition" (10). As alternative, transformative rhetorics, they "challenge and put pressure on traditional canons of rhetorical thought" and they "give voice to those whose discursive acts have gone unrecognized within Western culture" (Gray-Rosendale and Gruber 3). By "reading it [the rhetorical tradition] crookedly and telling it slant," and by making "the unfamiliar familiar and the familiar unfamiliar" (Glenn 8), these efforts make what used to be invisible rhetorical experiences visible and consequential, and they transform what used to be at best marginalized players into legitimate, viable contenders.

A word of caution is perhaps in order here with respect to our characterization of emergent ethnic rhetorics as "alternative," as "transformative." First, the use of the term "alternative" to characterize emergent ethnic rhetorics is not without problems. Gray-Rosendale and Gruber are mindful of the fact that "no rhetoric is fully `alternative' but always both rewrites the tradition and inevitably becomes part of it" (4). Nevertheless, they see alternative rhetorics as significant in their own right because they "advance a critical counterpoint to the tradition" and they "expand the territory of what constitutes students' and teachers' perceptions of rhetoric and rhetorical texts" (4-5).

On the other hand, there is a paradox lurking here that may have escaped Gray-Rosendale and Gruber. Given the fact that words hardly ever shake off their past (Austin, "A Plea for Excuses" 201; Gee, Discourse Analysis 54), the use of "alternative" acknowledges, and in fact reproduces, a hierarchical division between (the dominant) one and the (subordinate) other-because it is precisely such division that motivates the emergence of an alternative as the "disruptive" other. Such division further risks marginalizing the alternative/the other given the value differential evidenced in cultural capital' that each element in this division represents and delivers. The use of "alternative" may also imply, however incorrectly, that its counterpart (read as the dominant or the mainstream) is pure and stable, and that it is otherwise immune from alternative influences or infiltrations. As a matter of fact, though, the emergence of any rhetoric, whether it be alternative or ethnic, in part owes its genesis both to the internal divisions and instability experienced by its counterpart and to an environment where discursive differences cannot be fully dissolved and where the process of assimilation is filled with elements of resistance.

Second, to view emergent ethnic rhetorics-like Chinese American rhetoric-as transformative in relation to European American rhetoric should not be taken to suggest at all that the latter is monolithic, rigid, and unchanging. After all, rhetoric is about discourse production and discourse consumption in particular communities and environments. As I have proposed elsewhere, since European American rhetoric, like any other rhetoric, changes over time, it might be more accurate to view such (dominant) rhetoric as consisting of certain clusters of discursive features on a discursive continuum, and over time new clusters or new alliances emerge that can overlap with the old (Mao, "Re-Clustering" 114-15). Such discursive clusters are likely to give rise to codified expressions and patterns that serve as preferred, though unmarked, modes of communication for people in positions of power. It is the same group of people that have a stake in ensuring the continuity or stability of these discursive features-because the latter help encode and reinforce a pattern of assumptions, beliefs, values, and interpretations of the world by which these people operate (Foss 291). On the other hand, these "institutionalized" features may not necessarily reflect or square with ever-changing, multi-faceted practices on the ground-even though, ironically, individuals or people of lower social status might rely on these features or these discursive constructs to read or critique their own divergent behaviors, thus perpetuating the existing power imbalance. To appropriate Bizzell ("The Intellectual Work" 3), it is the privileged social position that has remained constant and that has in turn allowed such discursive constructs to count as European American rhetoric.

Effective as these alternative, transformative articulations might be in contesting the normative powers of the dominant rhetoric, their effectiveness cannot be achieved, I want to suggest, by appealing to rhetorical uniqueness, by claiming an abstract pattern of coherence. Similarly, the making of Chinese American rhetoric cannot be realized through rhetorical uniqueness-qua-coherence. Not only because there is none to be had, but also because such a move leads to at least three problems.

First, rhetorical uniqueness is evidently predicated upon the importance of being different. But the notion of "difference" deserves some critical reflection. Renato Rosaldo, in Culture and Truth, criticizes the methodological norms in ethnographical studies that conflate the notion of culture with the idea of differences. For him, the term "cultural difference" becomes just as redundant as that of "cultural order," because "to study a culture is to seek out its differences, and then to show how it makes sense, as they say, on its own terms" ( 201) . In this regard, the notion of difference poses a problem because such differences can never be absolute and because they are only "relative to the cultural practices of ethnographers and their readers" (202). Further, an exclusive focus on differences risks obscuring the dynamics of power and culture. For example, there are those who are culturally less visible, but enjoy enormous power to perform this kind of cultural analysis and to evaluate differences according to a (preferred) norm. And there are those who possess rich culture but wield no power, and who are only supposed to be dissected and disseminated (201-2).

Further, any discussion of difference-be it cultural or rhetorical-has to deal with the effects of difference, too. That is to say, there is a difference-no pun intended-between those who set out to identify differences only to contain their effects with, say, a metaphor of "otherness," and those who perceive such differences not simply as the object of interpretation, but as "the active agent of articulation," as possessing the power "to signify, to negate, to initiate its historic desire, to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse" (Bhabha, Location, of Culture 31). In other words, any recognition of rhetorical differences pertaining to Chinese American rhetoric, or to any other ethnic rhetoric for that matter, does help challenge rhetorical homogeneity or the norms of European American rhetoric. However, if such recognition presupposes an insistence to maintain a boundary because of these differences, and to frame them within an overall boundary of a nation-state, we then run the risk of reduplicating a power dynamic that would probably make it quite daunting, if not impossible, for Chinese American rhetoric to be heard and listened to on its own terms.

(Continues...)

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Utah State University Press
• Date d'édition: 2006
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0874216400
• ISBN 13: 9780874216400
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 177
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne