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Uptaking Race: Genre, MSG, and Chinese Dinner
Get PDFScientific research demonstrates that monosodium glutamate (MSG) is neither solely found in Chinese food nor a cause for health panics. Nonetheless, such a narrative still persists in the public sphere. I conduct a rhetorical analysis of the original debate on MSG to illuminate how the process of genre uptake – the process of information selection and translation from medical discussion to popular news – facilitated this prejudiced understanding. In the original debate about MSG’s effects, doctors trivialized this issue via satire that was based on latent stereotypes of Chinese identity. Although performed as insider humor, these responses were sufficiently aligned to genre expectations so as to appear to outside readers as unquestionable medical fact. As this knowledge was taken up and disseminated in the public sphere, the markers of humor disappeared, but the prejudicial views remained. This case demonstrates how the process of genre uptake can perpetuate prejudiced ideological narratives even in the absence of overt discrimination
A Dialogue on Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Get PDFIn October of 2016, an international symposium was held on the campus of Indiana University, Bloomington, devoted to the belatedly emerging work of the early twentieth-century author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. The phenomenon of Krzhizhanovsky’s re-discovery and introduction to English readers as a major figure of European Modernist literature, hidden from the world until the last decade of the twentieth century, provides an ideal scenario for how the institutions of publishing—through selection, translation, editing, design, and marketing—help to shape our understanding of which texts are included within the category of “world literature,” along with the very idea of what “world literature” means
Rhetorical Principles on Uncertainty for Transdisciplinary Engagement and Improved Climate Risk Communication
Get PDFCode-Switching in Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera and Walcott’s Omeros: A Literary Device for “New Readability”
Get PDFThe Transcoding of “Women Empowerment” as “Empoderamiento de la Mujer”: a Post-colonial Translation Theory for Transnational Feminist Rhetorics
Get PDFIn the work of transnational feminist scholars, there is a share interest in investigating the colonial practices that affect women’s lives around the globe. In “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1986) Mohanty claims that scholars in the field should “detect (…) colonialist move(s) in the case of a hegemonic first-third world connection in scholarship” (349) in order to recognize the peculiarities of the cultures whose discourses are being created and thus, avoid the universalization and “homogenization of class, race, religious, cultural and historical specificities of the lives of women” (348). In this regard, Dingo touches upon the vital role of translations in the transcoding of arguments: “the way policy makers and development experts translate the term gender mainstreaming into policy documents should be a crucial concern for feminist rhetoritians because this act of translation demonstrates how arguments shift and change due to economic and geopolitical contexts and thus shows how power informs rhetorics” (2012: 31). Dingo´s conceptualization of the term “translation” is ambiguous, sometimes used to refer to “transcoding” (resituate a taken-for-granted term within the same language in order to fit certain ideologies, 31) and other times as the transfer of words from the source language to the target language (104). In this article, I aim to investigate the “transcoding” of the concept "women empowerment" as it is translated from English to Spanish and vice versa with the attempt to “make visible the ways in which all of our knowledge is mediated” (Queen 2008: 486) from the perspective of a post-colonial theory of translation
How Cultural Rhetorics Can Change the Conversation: Towards New Communication Spaces to Address Human Trafficking
Get PDFRhetoric, as a discipline, can and should play a part in helping (re)formulate and (re)frame approaches to human trafficking because of the potential for such change to ripple through cultural discourse, leading to shifts across public understanding, law, and policy. Specifically, I argue that a Cultural Rhetorics approach is both necessary for and best suited to initiate the building of new communication spaces to address the issue of human trafficking. Indeed, the lens of Cultural Rhetorics reveals new priorities for scholarly intervention. This work must be rooted in and driven by attentiveness to and careful handling of stories. Such an alternate approach might more closely consider and account for the stories that individuals tell about themselves, the stories that survivors tell about their lived experiences, and the stories that institutions put forward about human trafficking. In so doing, we might then be better able to evaluate how these stories interconnect and constellate not just with each other, but also with a range of cultural influences
Between Control and Constraint: Charting Three Rhetorics of Patient Agency
Get PDFAs we enter an era of so-called Do it Yourself health, “patient agency” has become a dominant theme in public discourses of health and medicine. Despite increased salience, patient agency remains a vague term that is capable of being operationalized and moralized in ways that escape attention. To illustrate this, I chart common rhetorical configurations of patient agency in public discourses of health and medicine, and in doing so find that patient agency is commonly rhetoricized as one of three overlapping patient capacities: the capacity to know, the capacity to prevent, and the capacity to decide. Ultimately, I argue that these three rhetorics of patient agency can be deployed to cultivate health subjectivities imbued with untenable ideals of individual control that constrain, rather than open, patients’ rhetorical choices
Paralogical Hyperbole: A “Missing Link” Between Technical and Public Spheres
Get PDFIn this article I describe a type of hyperbole which does not add certainty to a technical claim by removing qualifiers and hedges to make boring science exciting. Rather, paralogical hyperbole overstates while jumping from one line of reasoning to another. For example, citing technical science to argue publicly that the “missing link” has been found is exaggerative, and in a direction illogical, given its starting premise, born of a technical sphere, which actually identifies “missing links” as indefensible claims. From an analysis of the popularization efforts of a few scientists regarding Darwinius Marsillae, a fossilized lemur-like skeleton first described in the technical scientific journal PLoS ONE, I show that paralogical hyperbole can result in discourses that are unnecessarily polarizing regarding scientifically-opposed publics, and can pose threats to broader public understandings of science. I close with a discussion of the rhetorical practices of dissoi logoi and prolepsis as means by which to more consciously experience and represent scientific rhetorics characterized by parlogical hyperbole