Cultures relation to rhetoric, their influence on each other, what we can infer from cultural rhetoric, and what the fascination we have with Contact Zone Rhetoric(s) teaches us about our own society, are all things I consider when engaging this topic. I immediately think of ‘Cultural Rhetoric,’ which is the third major writing assignment for my 101 class, and feel encouraged that the readings for this week, affirmed with the information presented in our course, coincide with my initial understanding of Contact Zone Rhetoric.
As I instruct predominantly first year writers about ‘basic’ English composition, my understanding of rhetoric, and why a firm understanding of it is essential to one’s success – I become a little anxious as I think to our upcoming lesson on Cultural Rhetoric. It’s anxiety good and bad, encouraging and defeating. I know that recognizing one’s culture is crucial in achieving a certain modicum of success, however, I’m unsure as to how I can teach them how to recognize the importance of contrastive and cultural rhetorics when their (un)assumed privilege does not allow for further comprehension. Reading Robert Kaplan’s article, What in the World is Contrastive Rhetoric?, provided me with a possible solution to the anxiety I was having.
Professor Kaplan provides five questions that I hope will assist in their acknowledgment that the different ways in which people communicate (culturally) is vital in understanding the advances of the world. By allowing my students to ponder and discuss these questions among their peers, they will be introduced to various, yet equally important, schools of thought. The five questions Kaplan provides are as follows: (1) what may be discussed? (2) Who has the authority to speak/write? (3) What form(s) may the writing take? (4) What is Evidence? And, (5) what arrangement of evidence is likely to appeal to readers?
Subjecting my students to these questions should transition their thoughts about their assigned paper and begin discussing how our cultural backgrounds are much more than the color of our skin, and the place of our birth. Often times, culture, is instrumental in understanding the rhetoric of others. Their third paper should discuss whether or not they believe that we are our language; and if what we say is a fair reflection of our culture and who we are as people. This assignment, I believe, can be defined as an autoethnographic text; which Mary Louise Pratt defines in her article, Arts of the Contact Zone, as ‘a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them.’ (585) I'm hoping that by completing such an assignment, my students will learn the importance of appreciating the differences we often take for granted.
I also found equally as fascinating Pratt’s assertion that Contact Zone Rhetoric does not discriminate in the places that it frequents. She refers back to an instance illustrating when her young son and his friend, ages 6 and 7, were recipients of a lesson in Contact Zone Rhetoric. Through her son’s interest in baseball cards, he ‘learned the history of American racism and the struggle against it; he saw the depression and two world wars from behind home plate’ (Pratt 583) As encouraging as this is, I also worry that this could also be indicative that media has too strong of a hold on cultural and societal outcomes.
Now, as I’m thinking about culture, I think back to the interculturality chart that was shown/discussed in class, and I begin to ponder about where my current cultural surrounding fits. Which is odd, because I feel like we, the people, should all be classified under the same cultural section, but we choose to be so violently different for the same reason that the word ‘power’ is made to be so apparently different in the interculturality chart - which is why this topic is so necessary. Each person is a contact zone having “multiple cultural identities. We are each dealt many culture cards—some we can change, others we cannot, and still others we can play at certain contexts. We may play a new card but our discourse community may not accept it or recognize it. Some cards are more powerful than others—they have more social currency or cultural capital than others, as Bourdieu would say; and some of us have more cards to play with. Still, we all play our hands strategically, weighing the odds with each turn.” (Monroe slide 4)
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