Aren't these texts more a study in western interpretation?

I have to wonder about The Rhetorical Tradition after reading Baca’s essay. It seems that there is no way to move outside of our western-minded ideals and experience because of our language and the rhetorical tradition that has been instilled through this language. Baca identifies the dilemma as a “cultural double bind” wherein “either Mexican ‘rhetorics’ are so different from Greco-Roman ones that Western thinkers cannot consider them rhetoric proper” or “Mexican expression must become similar to and absorbed by Western conceptualizations of persuasive speech” (128). It appears as if the westerner’s inclination is to populate the discourse of other’s with their own thoughts, words, and cultural ideas. We (and I use “we” to mean westerners as I am one—and in writing “we” it seems as if I am trying to subjugate my reader) have a tendency to translate rather than understand. We find the cognates of Mexican rhetoric in our own classical understandings; we look at speech as a form of persuasion rather than as poetics and metaphor and expression like Anzaldua’s rhetoric. And in examining it this way, we end up either populating/colonizing it as ours or we end up destroying it because of its Otherness. (In this entry I am looking at the former. My previous post paid more attention to the violence associated with these rhetorics.)

            Earlier in his essay, Baca outlines the problematic nature of reading Anzaldua’s work as a translation: “[Borderlands] will be persistently misunderstood, mistranslated, and misappropriated unless comprehended as ‘new’ rationalities and practices that emerge from the conditions created by colonial legacies” (124). To put it in terms of colonialism, I have to wonder if the Rhetorical Tradition’s use of translation creates a power dynamic that subjugates discourse and forces the Other to become western. Again, I want to relate this to Bakhtin and his idea of dialogism—that a hegemonic dialogue disempowers and shapes the utterances of the Other. The dominant voices of the Rhetorical Tradition are still those Western thinkers that frontload the tome—Aristotle, Plato, Vico, Bacon, Augustine, etc. Even the marginalized, rediscovered figures of Aspasia contribute to the western hegemony of the Tradition. By the time we encounter the rhetorics that step outside of the western mind, the tradition of what-is-rhetoric and what-is-not-rhetoric has already been established. The editors—part of the dominant discourse community—are the ones who give Anzaldua her standing as a rhetor. They do it by inclusion, translation, and most markedly, in their introduction.

            Keep in mind I am not necessarily chiding the editors (this time). But I think that as humans we cannot step outside of ourselves and experience the other. We come to develop our understandings through difference (at least that’s what Derrida argues in my Lit Theory class). The editors seem forget their relationship to these texts, and in forgetting, they populate the discourse with their Western ideology. We can see an illustration of the power relations (literally) in Pratt’s essay as she analyzes the changing dynamics of Andeans and Spaniards in Poma’s New Chronicle (35-36). It seems like a basic thing—that to show domination of something we put it above or first (think of winning a wrestling match or where God sits in relation to humans), but this is forgotten in the compilation of a text.

            [Warning: Another tangent on capitalism and oppression ahead.]

            But is it really forgotten? I have to go back to Eisenstein here and look at the major moving force in Western culture—print. As Pratt notes, “the main instrument that made bourgeois nation-building projects possible was print capitalism” (37). So now I have to broaden my scope out a little more: What has been colonized in the university? Are oral traditions populated by the Western move to put everything into print? What about our tenure systems and how we perceive “fact” over “hearsay” or “rumor”? I think it says a great deal about our fixedness as westerners when we only come to look at Andean persecution in Poma’s text (which was authored as a book to appeal to the dominant discourse community) which was interpreted for us by Pratt. This is how we experience the Other in the west.