Invitation to Participate

We invite you to read and be acquainted with what has emerged in Asian/Asian American feminist rhetorical studies. Through the three rounds of conversation that we transcribe below, we hope to inspire you to take actions to further diversify the research and teaching of feminist rhetorics by engaging Asian/Asia American women rhetors in your own scholarship and classroom. More broadly, our aim and call in this conversation serve to extend the Asian/Asian American Caucus’s mission to increase the representation of Asian/Asian American scholars in writing studies and advance scholarship on Asian/Asian American rhetoric through critically reflexive, contextualized practices.

Round One

Hui Wu: What are some key issues or themes in the study of Asian/Asian American rhetorics in the twenty-first century; how do they complicate existing conversations about the intersection of race, gender, sexualities and ethnicities in feminist and Asian/Asian American studies?

Let me give you a general idea of the projects published in line with this type of research. Asian American rhetorical studies were heavily influenced by mainstream feminist rhetorical studies. In the early 2000s Asian American studies was still considered a minor field. In feminist rhetorical studies, Shirley Logan was a frontrunner. In addition, Patricia Bizzell published a special issue on feminist historical studies with Cheryl Glenn, Andrea Lunsford, Jane Donawerth, and Nan Johnson. At that time, the major effort was to recover women's voices. Today we need to reconsider the issue of methodology. We have seen more talk about methodologies in comparative rhetoric, for example, College English. LuMing Mao and Morris Young are leading figures on Asian/Asian American methodologies. In terms of Asian American rhetorical studies, LuMing Mao and Morris Young published the first three books on this issue. Morris Young's Minor Re/Vision studied Hawaii newspapers in the first half of 20^th century, and LuMing Mao's Reading the Chinese Fortune Cookies examined rhetoric performed by Chinese Americans. Later they co-edited an anthology on Asian American rhetoric. More recently, there is a publication about writing in the Japanese internment camp by Hui Wu, who addressed how composition was taught in Japanese internment camps. This is what we have today. Although Asian, like Chinese feminist rhetoric has been done to a degree, Asian American feminist rhetoric has not taken off.

David Gold: I am so glad to hear you say that. I regularly teach a progressive women's rhetoric class and intend to expand to make it as diverse as possible. Once in a while, students who are interested in Asian American rhetoric would inquire: "What's out there?"

Hui Wu: I remember one year somebody in the Asian/American Caucus at CCCC mentioned a project in New York in the 1950's and 1960's about the petition for some rights; it was about a guy I think. But I don't know about women's voice. You really have to do archival research, especially research on women immigrants of different kinds. I have 168 Japanese internment students'compositions in my office, but I have not had time to go through them.

David Gold: Where did you get these?

Hui Wu: I did research on the Japanese internment camps. There are two kinds of camps: Justice camps for adults—for guys who were suspicious of being spies—and internment camps for families, kids, and women. When I looked at the archives, I realized I needed to make copies of them.

Rebecca Dingo: You found an amazing archive.

Hui Wu: Yeah, I know.

Chanon Adsanatham: David, to answer your question, one possible potential, I am not sure, is to look into Buddhist nunnery communities because in the Buddhist Mahayana tradition there are Buddhist temples devoted to nuns. As a part of their mission, they do charity works. Perhaps the charity work was not for non-Asian Americans. They might have focused on Asian women. So I wonder there might be potentials there.

David Gold: Sure. Or the lay society; I am thinking along the secular side.

Hui Wu: Another site to look at is public websites of Japanese internment camps. You just search on the web and they have lots of archival work there. One year, somebody, by simply looking at the websites and their discourse, did a paper and published a paper in CCC that analyzes the discourse being used to maintain the website. For teaching a class like yours, I recommend that they should check out the website.

Critical Commentary One

The first workshop points out several opportunities for doing archival recovery work of Asian American women's rhetoric in the Buddhist temple, internment camps, and online. Beyond these places, scholars might also examine records from various Chinese family associations in California. Historically, these associations offered aid, protection, and socialization for Chinese immigrants, who shared a similar family name, providing a supportive space against racial prejudice and castigation in America. To broaden recovery beyond American history and context, scholars who do not read Asian languages might analyze translated writings of Asian women through a rhetorical lens, using extrapolation (Ratcliffe) as a method, and they might also partner with scholars in Asian languages and literature at their home campus to learn about female figures in various traditions.

For those who are interested in incorporating rhetorical works by Asian women into their courses, Jane Donawerth's anthology Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900 contains translated selections of works by Pan Chao of China and Sei Shonagon of Japan. Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald's Available Means: An Anthology of Women's Rhetoric also features a rhetorical essay by Trinh T. Minh-Ha. Beyond these primary texts, Bo Wang and Hui Wu have published articles on twentieth-century women's rhetors in China. Their essays present their recovery and analysis of Chinese female writers in the twentieth century. Outside the East Asian tradition, Chanon Adsanatham has recovered and translated the private letters of a nineteenth-century Thai queen, Sukhumala (1861-1927), in his study of Thai conduct rhetoric, and Roberta Binkley has studied Enheduanna, a high priestess in the Sumerian tradition. We encourage scholars to incorporate and pair some of these scholarly works in their teaching of rhetorical theory and histories. Doing so enables them to not merely add Asian/Asian American women's voices into the tradition but use them to rethink and challenge traditional thinking about rhetoric through a more reflexive cross-cultural lens.

Round Two

Hui Wu: Our question is: Do you happen to know Asian/American feminist rhetoric/rhetorical studies at all? If so, can you name some names?

Chenchen Huang: (Towards Jane Donawerth.) How about the book you edited?

Jane Donawerth: Yeah Pan Chao and Sei Shonagon. But those are rhetorical theorists, not a scholar. (Points at Hui Wu.) And my friend's work on Thai women's rhetoric (points at Chanon Adsanatham). I read an article about early modern Japanese women and conduct book rhetoric and how they read Pan Chao. I also read a bunch of Indian rhetoric long time ago.

Participant 1: When I was a PhD student and looked at feminist scholarship, I read Hui Wu's article, and what I remembered from it the most is the story of your mother, either you or your mother (referring to Wu's article "Historical Studies of Women Here and There") doesn't understand why American women want equality because equality in Communist China was not that great.

Hui Wu: The article was from 2000. At that time, there was a debate about "what is feminist methodology in rhetoric?" There was a controversy about historiographical methodology between Xin Lu Gale, Susan Jarratt and Cheryl Glenn, and I wrote a response to it. I then wrote a piece on methodology. Recently, I just sent out an article to Shirley Rose about how feminists look at power. Is it the male power that we want to have or do we have a different sense of power? In terms of power, Asian Americans have a different history in the United States, until 1965 or 1968. Japanese and Chinese were not allowed to be American citizens. They could be immigrants forever, so there was a double jeopardy for women at that point. In San Francisco, most of the women who came as earlier immigrants were either wives of rich merchants, or they were prostitutes. The immigration officers, when they issued visas, they would ask the women to show their feet. If the women happened to have bound feet, they were allowed to enter. If their feet were big and unbound, they were not allowed.

Nan Johnson: It's a class difference.

Hui Wu: Exactly. Because rich girls are supposed to have bound feet, you can marry up. That means you either come to the US to join your family or you have some ties. But if you are poor, you have to labor. So you cannot even afford to have bound feet. But it's interesting that after that, the Japanese/Chinese/Korean immigrants or Asian immigrants became model citizens and now Berkeley and Harvard had to set a quota for admission because "hey, you are too good. We cannot have so many of you." Recently, there's a quota of 20% or 30% for all Asian Americans. No more. And for medical schools, the same thing applies.

Patricipant 1: In the early 60s, Miami, Ohio had a quota limiting the number of Jews that could be admitted.

Hui Wu: So you can see the prejudice of the United States. Discrimination is very interesting. Early on, blacks were always there; they were enslaved. At the very beginning, Irish were discriminated and enslaved as "indentured servant." Then the Jews came, and then the black people and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s emerged, and finally the Asians. Back then Asian Americans didn't even "exist" because they were not allowed to be citizens. Then there was a double jeopardy against women, as always. (Nan Johnson: This is fascinating.) We talk about prejudices all the time.

Chenchen Huang: I guess what Dr. Wu was talking about is how porous the racial category is, as well as the fact that the color divide between black and white is very much a social construct. So I wonder if the label of "Asian/Asian Americans" is a fair characterization of the demographics? For example, where do Indians or people coming from the Indian subcontinent fit in this category? Are they Asians or non-Asians?

Hui Wu: You've raised a good question. Last year at the Asian/American rhetoric workshop, we had people from Hawaii and their story was totally different. It was so colorful; I was not aware of the stories they discussed, how they grew up. There was no one singular story to characterize everybody. People come from different countries and hyphenated identities will always define us. Though Chenchen and I looked similar, I cannot assume she is a Chinese. I would be uncertain about what her heritage is, and I would have to seek information about her identity.

Megan Schoettler: I am looking at the rhetoric of the Marshall Islands. In some areas you can say it's Asian American studies.

Nan Johnson: What are your research questions?

Megan Schoettler: Essentially I am interested in nuclear rhetorics. So I began last semester with Yu-Fang Cho [a literature faculty at Miami University] to do some archival work, looking at the rhetoric around how US scientists talked about the bodies of the Marshall Islanders who were affected by the nuclear fallout and the testing they did. In comparison to contemporary rhetoric, I looked at the embassy's websites of the Marshall Islands to see how there is a lineage of tracing the Marshall Islanders into a state of exception, in which they don't have the same rights as other Americans. Now I am interested in looking at the legacy of that, specifically how the Marshall Islanders are pursuing 10 countries that violated this pact, saying that they will get rid of their nuclear arsenals. There are many stories about the nuclear fallout and trials for their cases. Currently three countries agreed to take it to international courts and listen to them. So I am really interested in what they are saying and the stories they tell. It is a comparison between a harsh scientific way of discussing bodies to a humanistic approach to talk about people and suffering.

Participant 1: What led you to the topic?

Megan Schoettler: First semester at Miami [Ohio] taking a literature class called Transnational Feminist Studies. On the first day of class, we watched a documentary about the nuclear tests on the Marshall Island in the 1940s. I became interested in that subject matter and wrote my term project on it. Subsequently, I wrote a few more pieces from a cultural studies'perspective. That's how I got inspired.

Chanon Adsanatham: Are you familiar with Bob Johnson's book? He used to be at Miami and his book won an award a few years ago. It is about the rhetoric of nuclear testing. That might be good source for you. Also Spivak's Other Asians. She argues that the conception of Asia is constrained and needs to be pluralized beyond its traditional conception.

Critical Commentary Two

Cross-cultural methodology is an issue touched upon in our second round of discussion, but we didn't go into great depth, as the conversation took a different turn. Considering that methodology colors how we collect, interpret, and present our scholarship, scholars interested in doing Asian/Asian American women's rhetoric must carefully heed several methodological issues: grounding our analysis in historical context; interrogating the impacts of our bias, ideologies, and assumptions during cross-cultural engagement; situating our subjectivities; studying the Other on its own cultural terms; questioning how we are representing the Other; heeding power dynamics affecting the study process; examining the implications of our analysis on the culture and stakeholders involved; heeding gender as a lens for interpreting materials and experience; being mindful of incongruities and contradictions that exist within a culture. In short, scholars must heed care, reflexivity, and historicity without losing critical sensibility. Feminist and comparative rhetoricians have proposed several notable concepts that we encourage researchers to borrow, integrate, or reappropriate to develop their own methodologies for studying and teaching Asian/Asian American women's rhetorics: recontextualization (Mao); geopolitical approach (Wang); enlightened feminist rhetorical theory (Wu); REDRES (Adsanatham); Afrafeminist ideology (Royster); rhetorical listening (Ratcliffe); intersectionality (Crenshaw); and critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalizing points of view (Royster and Kirsch).

For the most recent work on cross-cultural methodology in rhetorical studies, see LuMing Mao and Bo Wang's symposium on comparative rhetoric in Rhetoric Review.

Another key issue, as Chenchen Huang brought up in her discussion, is the importance of recognizing diversity or heteroglossia within the Asian/Asian American tradition. Despite the umbrella term of "Asian/Americans," previous studies note that material circumstances faced by various ethnic groups often differ (Lee). Evolving racial dynamics (Maeda), immigration policy (Hsu), and geopolitical relations between the U.S. and Asia (Cho) have to varying degrees contributed to diversifying Asian/Asian American histories and lives, and in turn, babelizing their political discourses. This recognition within Asian/Asian American rhetorics has sensitized us to rhetorical difference and language specificity in our studies. LuMing Mao and Morris Young's edited volume exemplifies a text that foregrounds difference over simple generalization. Meanwhile, we should be aware that Asian/Asian Americans share a common experience in their struggles for economic benefits, citizenship, and civil liberties. Asian/Asian Americans have deployed rhetorical discourse to align their political agendas and formulate a collective identity (Wei). In addition, studies have shown that Asian/Asian Americans collaborated with African Americans to form interracial coalitions in protest against systematic discrimination and economic suppression (Maeda). Future works that examine how rhetoric negotiates these cross-cultural, interracial differences is much needed.

Furthermore, Asian/Asian American rhetorics have greatly developed in the past decade, and central to the continuing growth of the field is the inclusion of Asian/American voices in rhetoric and composition classrooms. In doing so, we will be able to stimulate, promote, and sustain interest in advancing scholarship. Moreover, we should encourage and support students'effort to uncover or recover rhetorical practices performed by Asian/Asian Americans currently left out in our scholarship, most pertinently non-Chinese and women rhetors. In keeping with what we've discussed above, when teaching Asian/American rhetorics, we can foster class discussions to interrogate the various methodological choices pursued by different scholars; we can also supply materials from outside the field to contextualize students' understanding of "Asian/Americans."

Round Three

Hui Wu: My first question: do you happen to know any Asian/Asian American rhetorical studies or scholars? Can name some?

Cristy Beemer: I know LuMing Mao. Morris Young. Anybody from Miami and Min-Zhan Lu.

Hui Wu: Min-Zhan Lu did one piece. Do you happen to know Bo Wang? She does Chinese feminist rhetoric. Her work addresses mostly women writers of early 1920s and 1930s. My work is mostly on Chinese women in the 1960s. Is there anything else that you know about Asian/Asian American women's rhetorics?

Participant 2: People always say that Asian rhetoric is more circular in pattern than the Western rhetorical tradition.

Chenchen Huang: That's contrastive rhetoric.

Hui Wu: If you are interested in that, my book is coming out in September from Southern Illinois University Press. It's on China's first treatise on rhetoric and you can see how rhetoric was taught in ancient times, how it was formed. Jan Swearingen and I are finishing an article on logic because some German scholars (one French and one German) misread China's rhetoric, particularly China's first treatise. So we used that as a case to unfold the so-called "dubious logic," which will be out in China Media Research in summer. It's more concrete examples for Kaplan's indirect or direct rhetoric. Yin-Yang.

Jesse Dobson: How are you going to describe the difference between western rhetoric and Asian rhetoric to someone that doesn't know much about?

Hui Wu: What would I do? I would say different rhetorics are decided by the context. For example, in the West when we talk about rhetoric, we discuss argumentation, speech to the public, debates, more linear thinking—for example Gorgias's Encomium of Helen. Chinese rhetoric is more action-based. It differs from what Robert Kaplan described in his study of contrastive rhetoric. However, there is a step-by-step logic in Chinese rhetoric, but it's more relational and about correlative thinking than straightforward discourse. Most of historical Chinese rhetoric is conducted one-on-one to a single audience. David Hall and Roger Ames refer that as "analogical thinking" in their book Anticipating China.

Participant 2: When you say correlative, do you mean simultaneously?

Hui Wu: When you talk about one thing, it is not about one thing itself but rather how it relates to other things. Because the conversation happens one-on-one, you have lots of themes to discuss. The greetings are usually carefully crafted so that they can lead to the next thing/agenda, and the next topic will lead to the next issue, but these topics are interrelated. You have to have the mindset to see why they are interrelated. Be aware that the discourse is not designed to confuse you, but rather it is quietly helping you to see the point I want to make and you actually act on it on your own. Because you always tried to persuade your boss, the ruler, you cannot persuade him directly. You cannot talk as a child to somebody that is superior to you. For example in the Japanese tradition, the parliament debate doesn't happen openly. They send bureaucrats to different cabinets to tell them the proposals of different candidates and poll their views about them respectively. The cabinet will negotiate from behind the scene, knowing who is against or for the issue before they vote for the proposals. If you talk about teaching and happen to have ESL students from China or Japan, sometimes they write with a long opening paragraph, and you wonder how it has anything to do with the topic. Their writing seems a bit different. But later I found out that some of my American students do that as well. In my graduate seminar, students start with a very general start.

Jesse Dobson: Is it safe to say, based upon what you said about the differences, that Asian rhetoric is less tasked to persuade but to seek mutual understanding?

Hui Wu: Right. So Asian students trained in US composition class, they feel liberated and are finally able to express what they want. But there may be generational difference between me and Chenchen's generation.

Chenchen Huang: Yeah. There is also the transition from the Communist style of writing to a post-Socialist style of writing. Considering how the society changes drastically in China, the style of writing and speaking evolves too. There is one scholar writing about Communist style of writing. (I was referring to Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero).

Hui Wu: So Chanon, how do you contribute to the conversation?

Chanon Adsanatham: I look at Thai rhetoric. I argue that conduct is a major form of rhetoric in the Thai tradition. My book is trying to make that argument through presenting different case studies from three historical periods in Thai history. One of which focused on how a Thai queen used conduct as rhetoric to help her son achieved excellence and recognition in the royal court. My main contention is that rhetoric in the Thai culture doesn't always rely on verbal argumentation like how it is often practiced in the Greco-Roman tradition. When I was on the job market, people would always ask about how I would teach Thai rhetoric in first-year writing? Of course I had a rhetorical answer. But I often wondered: Do you really want the true answer? Because the true answer is you need not always make them write essays or rely on verbal practices to achieve rhetorical ends, so Thai conduct rhetoric can help students engage a modality that's often neglected in writing pedagogy: what the New London Group calls the gestural modality. Positing conduct as rhetoric broadens students'thinking about the available means of persuasion, which makes our pedagogy more multimodal. We often say we embrace multimodality, but too often, we focus on visual, sonic, and verbal texts at the expense of other modalities. In the Thai tradition, one way to influence people is through demonstrating a particular form of action. I've shown this clearly through my analysis of a nineteenth-century Thai queen's private writings. Embodied conduct or what I call kaya karma represents a powerful text and discourse to create change in the Thai tradition. There are several reasons why kaya karma is privileged. One is because of the Buddhist conception of karma or conduct: how you conduct yourself affects your future. Also in Thai traditional society, it was deviant to verbally openly argue against an authority figure, an adult or the absolute monarch. One way to create influence, then, was through creating examples and persuasion through conduct.

Critical Commentary Three

The third discussion session highlighted Asian/Asian American rhetoric and composition scholars'contributions to the study of rhetorical traditions from Asian/Asian American perspectives; it shows several new opportunities. First, incorporating Asian American experiences in composition (Shimabukuro), protest studies (Hoang), migration of literacies (Pandey), and language diversity (Sano-Francini et al.) can enrich the field in the teaching of composition by helping students better understand how language impacts power, meanings, mobility, and social justice for marginalized populations. Second, as we recognize that our composition classrooms are socially diverse, we as scholars and teachers need to ask ourselves how we might adjust our teaching methods to accommodate the learning styles and experiences of students from differing cultural, gender, and social backgrounds. Asian/Asian Americans are made up of individuals whose heritage originated from the Asian continent. Yet, the Asian continent is diverse politically and socially, leading to disparate rhetorical practices. For example, Chenchen Huang pointed out "that as society changes drastically in China, the style of writing and speaking evolves too." Chanon Adsanatham also mentioned that conduct is a major form of rhetoric in the Thai culture, extending rhetorical studies beyond verbal practices in the Aristotelian paradigm. In addition, many Asian Americans were not born or raised in Asia. These Asian Americans harbor a different set of literacies within the U.S. (Sano-Francini et. al). Heeding the diversities that Asian Americans bring into the classroom, scholars might incorporate translingual approaches into their pedagogy by having students critically reflect on the politics of language diversity in American society through a comparative gender/cultural lens. Specifically, they can have students read works about literacy and language use by Amy Tan, Sui Sin Far, Bo Wang, Haivan Hoang, Mira Shimabukuro, Deborah Tannen, and Helene Cixous and put them into conversations with students'literacy experiences at home, work, and school to cultivate critical perspectives about the connections among language, literacy, culture, ethnicity, and gender.

As a whole, our session demonstrates that there is much more to the study of Asian/Asian American rhetorics than what we were able to highlight in the Action Hour Workshop. This is true not only with regard to feminist rhetorical studies, but also to cross-cultural research in general. Asian/Asian American rhetorical studies brought new inquiry methods and traditions to complicate how we think about the Rhetorical Tradition and women's rhetorics through a more diverse global lens. Ultimately, further engaging Asian/Asian American rhetorical scholarship through feminist perspectives in our research and pedagogy can help our discipline and students become more thoughtful and culturally reflexive readers, communicators, and citizens in our ever growing pluralistic society.

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