Bahri, Deepika. “Terms of Engagement: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Composition Studies

Bahri, Deepika. “Terms of Engagement: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and
Composition Studies.” Crossing Borderlands. Eds. Andrea A. Lunsford and
Lahoucine Ouzgane. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. 67-83

Summary: “In Terms of Engagement: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Composition Studies,” Deepika Bahri treats “the confusion that have come to characterize both postcolonialism and the writing classroom in the current climate produced by transnationalism and economic globalization” by clarifying terms and concepts and showing in detail how a terministic reciprocity between composition and postcolonial studies may be effected” (5).

Area Cluster: 103—Theories

Methodology: Application of theory

Citation: Bhabha, Spivak, Said, Viswanathan, Friere, Rushdie, Guha, Kent

Provocative Quotes:
“At the most obvious, postcolonialism enters the world of rhetoric and composition in the very person of the third world postcolonial, the authentically visible diversity. The growing numbers of expatriate, excolonized international academics, the coming of age of a sizable population of the immigrants of color in Anglo-America, as well as institutional goals of increasing visible diversity are gradually repopulating the once “color-less” halls of the academy. The presence of these individuals, along with that of a more diverse student body at a time of growing interest in diversity, is at least partly responsible for coloring the rhetoric and composition field in new ways.” (68).

“Nudged by, but not always prepared for, the new mandate to educate students in cultural sensitivity, the composition teachers find a ready ally in the lexicon and concept bank for dealing with otherness, oppression, resistance, and novelty that postcolonial theory has so obligingly provided in the last decade or so. Terms such as orientalism, subaltern, cultural tourism, colonization, neocolonization, monolithic other, difference, alterity, self/other, discourse, power, authority, speaking, agency, and subjectivity (not necessarily unique to postcolonial vocabulary but gathered efficiently under its umbrella) allow the teacher to negotiate the rocky terrain of otherness with some modicum of theoretical guidance and support for teaching and classroom discussion” (69).

“Increasingly, postcolonial theory deals not only with the impact of colonial education on individual and collective postcolonial identity, but also addresses the politics of education in the Anglo-American education where many postcolonial critics now find themselves. Such discussions can be very relevant to composition studies,which has been animated by issues of disciplinarity almost from the beginning” (69).

“Composition studies has found commonalities between its concerns and those raised in post-colonial theories. The former’s interest in rhetoric, discourse, and power; in the recovery of hitherto silenced voices; in the liberatory possibilities of advanced technologies; and in the relation of the text to the social finds echoes, and often counterparts, in the debates dominant in the latter” (70).

“Turning to postcolonialism and composition studies in particular, we might say that both have vested interest in examining the issues of authority and power as sources of psychological and social conflict. Both are, moreover, committed to a vision of theory and teaching as intervention and to addressing the persistently problematic dichotomy between theory and practice. It is thus not surprising that references to Said’s formulations of power and discourse or Spivak’s discussions on supplementarity, otherness catachresis, and strategic essentialism now routinely appear in discussions on histories of classical rhetoric, on questions of agency, and various other issues in rhetoric and composition” (71).

“Bhabha’s formulation of mimicry as a “discourse of ambivalence” that constructs “a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” might be seen as useful in many ways (Location 86): for those studying the rhetoric of public discourse, the politics of basic writing classrooms, the production of educated or institutionalized subjectivity, or the production of discourse in any of several situations where power conjoins with the production of knowledge but remains ambiguated by its own contradictions” (72).

“The notion of subaltern…already appears frequently in rhetoric and composition studies. It has served various roles in these discussions: to identify marginal student populations, to describe resistive modes of agency, and to tackle the difficulty of locating agency in the subaltern” (72).

“Postcolonialism as an alibi is certainly a problem for those in postcolonial studies, but it should alarm those in composition studies as well. The nexus of postcolonialism and multiculturalism, the often unreflective slippage, should alert us to the role both have come to play—often through engines of the composition classroom—within transnationalism. The enlistment of postcolonial texts within a liberal multiculturalist agenda is not without contradiction. If the purpose is to sensitize students to other cultures, there is certainly value in exposing them to a variety of cultural expressions. If it is also, as one assumes, to prepare them for dealing with difference in their own contexts, the postcolonial can actually serve as a distraction. It is the displacement of the local context, local concerns, and of local struggles by the postcolonial on the one hand and the re-christening of the local others with an abstract and historically voided category of post-colonial that concerns me. The net impact of the use of postcolonial literature in this fashion is to present the other as always beyond the local shores rather than in our very midst and to privilege the notion of distant difference instead of examining the complex ways in which difference and marginality are produced in particular contexts rather than being inherent by virtue of category” (77).

Same is the case with multiculturalism:

“the naming of the margin in euphemistic terms is a way of reducing discomfort and diverting attention away from precisely those problems of marginality, otherness, and of historical particulars that should be addressed” (77).

“The theoretical sophistication of postcolonialism and its links with elite (and largely Western) movements like poststructuralism and postmodernism, and its often conveniently abstract nature, reinforces its place within the academy while deferring attention to the operations of power and resistance in specific contexts” (77-8).

“The concepts of sunalternity, colonization, and postcolonial can…all be mobilized for initiating useful discussion, but their value is curtailed if they are left to function as generic shorthand” (79).

“The flattening of postcoloniality into a “condition” of the moment obscures the economic and social particulars of the postcolony as well as Anglo-America, while creating a liminal zone of otherness that diverts attention from the fact that the others in Anglo-America do not all exist on the same terms. In effect, the easy recourse to postcolonial tropes and concepts dehistoricize the local struggle and prevents the development of specific strategies to cope with the particularities of the moment, whether in the classroom or in theory” (80).

“the visible success of border-crossers like Bhabha and Rushdie can also create a dangerous illusion about the dexterity and comfort of “hybrid people.” The scores of underclass immigrants in Anglo-America and illegal boarder crossers not only cannot “make themselves comfortable” with the same ease that other postcolonials have but also know that border crossing can be dangerous and potentially fatal…because of the overvaluation of hybridity and transnational border crossing, the usual invocation of hybridity rarely addresses the issue of literal hybridity, that is, the plight of racial hybrids in a black-and-white culture” (81).

“The term subaltern can become meaningless…when it becomes overused. Spivak, in fact, complains that “it has become a kind of buzzword for any group that wants something that it does not have” (“Subatern” 290)” (81).

“The strategic use of postcolonial concepts can be very fruitful indeed in rhetoric and composition studies, and its own agenda and concerns have led to the development of several useful concepts that can, in turn, inform the debates in postcolonial studies or any discipline where the study of rhetoric, power knowledge, and resistance are of importance. Concepts such as the fundamental idea of “process” exemplified in the Janet Emig and Donald Murray and the new interest in social constructionism and postprocess, the notion of the “paralogic” associated with Thomas Kent, the distinction between “audience addressed/audience invoked” developed by Lunsford and Ede, intimations of the need for a new kind of literacy in the “late age of print” associated with Jay Bolter, the many useful reports from composition teachers in the pedagogical battlefield, and the growing and sophisticated discourse on electronics and communication associated with Jay Bolter, Richard Lanham, and Stuart Moulthrop, among others, can provide a conceptual map which is particularly apt for our times because these discussions have come out of a field that might be said to have come of age in the last twenty-five or so years” (82).

“collaboration and partnership between postcolonial and composition studies in tackling the challenges of the moment and of the future. If we can agree that the task before us all in a time of cultural chaos and a changing economic landscape is to conceive of a project beyond binaries, of grappling with the challenging proposition that both power and resistance are dispersed and come from everywhere instead of being neatly segregated for our theoretical and pedagogic purposes, then we all need to address in more nuanced ways the abiding issue of differentials and privilege without tokenization, to resist commodification without abandoning ethical investigation, and to agree to a rigorous (self) invigilation in our scholarly pursuits and in the practice of out everyday lives” (83).

Connal, Louise Rodriguez. “Transcultural Rhetorics for Cultural Survival.” Language Ideologies: Critical Perspectives on the Official English Movement. Ed. Roseann Duenas Gonzalez. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000. 318-332.

Summary: Connal proposes a pedagogy of transcultural rhetoric to address the need of increasingly diverse body of students in U.S. classroom. “One of the many questions this situation raises is how the students who carry the cultural and linguistic marks of diversity can flourish in the classroom and benefit from knowing—two or more languages and rhetorical styles. What follows is an attempt to respond to this question using my experience as a Puerto Rican woman and a writing teacher, as well as insights from postcolonial theory and feminist writing” (318).

Methodology: critical analysis, literature review,

Cited: Anzaldua, Bhabha, Spivak, Pratt, Trimbur, Said

Provocative quotes:

“English as the sole prerequisite of success in U.S. society is a rationalization that informs public policy much too often…Therefore many minorities within the United States feel coerced into assimilation by the prevailing practices of our educational system” (319-320).

“The transcultural rhetoric I use in my teaching can loosely be defined as a rhetoric that crosses and includes multiple languages, genres, and styles. Transcultural rhetoric expresses the sensibilities of people whose cultures are hybridized—people who affiliate with two or more cultures, languages, or dialects. Transcultural rhetoric is the argument for using and appreciating the different critical and cultural awareness that hybrid people can contribute to our society and knowledge base” (321-2).

“…transcultural rhetoric, of necessity, requires a willingness to cross into another person’s style, point of view, and so forth” (322).
“The challenge to the notion of cultural and linguistic purity or concepts such as English Only makes hybridity a useful alternative in cultural and linguistic education” (323).

“The idea of English Only seeks to eradicate differences that exist as a consequence of enslavement, immigration, and colonization of other nations. Yet these differences exist, and the pedagogy and language we use should address them” (325).

“The existence of hybridized student populations in our classes, indeed throughout the world, call for teaching that crosses barriers. As teachers owe should practice the “pedagogical arts of the contact zone” (Pratt 1991, 40). In other words, difference and diversity should not be interpreted as signs of crisis, Instead they should be embraced and celebrated in both our rhetoric and our pedagogy “ (326).

“The concept of transcultural rhetoric is important because it reveals the creative practice that is in fact already a part of the composing processes we teach in our composition classrooms” (330).

Willians, Bronwyn T. “Speak for Yourself? Power and Hybridity in the Cross-Cultural Classroom.”

Willians, Bronwyn T. “Speak for Yourself? Power and Hybridity in the Cross-Cultural Classroom.” College Composition and Communication 54.4 (2003):586-609.
Summary: “In this article I use the lens of postcolonial theory to reflect on my uses of a varied series of writing pedagogies in cross-cultural classrooms at an international college. Such reflection helps reveal how relations of power between teacher and students and underlying ideological assumptions about knowledge and discourse often resulted in hybrid responses of mimicry, frustration, incomprehension, and resistance. A pedagogy constructed against the backdrop of postcolonial theory might provide both students and their teacher in such a cross-cultural setting with a more complex and useful way of understanding issues of power, discourse, identity, and the role of writing” (586).
Research Methodology: sampling, interviews
Most Valuable Citation: Bhabha, Appadurai, Spivak, Pratt, Newkirk
Area Cluster: 103 Theory
Provocative Quotes:
“Though the pursuit of writing as a fundamental part of the liberal education was the goal of the course, the underlying ideological assumptions about knowledge and discourse often led to mutual frustration, resistance, incomprehension, and aporia” (587).

“To teach in a cross-cultural classroom with such terms as originality and analysis as an unexamined foundation perpetuates a disruptive epistemic violence for the students trying to come to terms with these unstated assumptions of power and the dominant culture” (589).

“Any writing about experiences that the student in a cross-cultural classroom might do is necessarily done in ways that serve the interpolation of that student into the dominant culture no less than the overt assimilation attempted through the current-traditional assignments” (594).

“For postcolonial students in a Western classroom, this presence of the Other in the dominant culture as “somewhere between the too visible and the not visible enough,” (Bhabha, “Culture’s” 56, author’s emphasis) is a site of ambivalence and resistance to the attempts of the dominant culture’s inscription and control” (603).
“Rather than either trying to assimilate students into the dominant culture’s discourse or helping them seek an ahistorical, apolitical synthesis from cultural differences, we should instead engage with them in an exploration of the cultural conflicts and power struggles often hidden in a cross-cultural writing classroom” (607).