Thinking Through Difference and Facts of Nonusage: A Dialogue Between Comparative Rhetoric and Translingualism

Abstract

Difference or facts of nonusage present a challenge to teacher-scholars of writing and rhetoric in WAC/WID and beyond. How can they appropriately engage different language and rhetorical practices in the classroom and relations of power asymmetry in discursive engagements? How can they effectively address issues of disciplinarity and challenge dominant paradigms and traditions in response to the needs and aspirations of linguistically and culturally diverse students? This article addresses these and other related questions by putting comparative rhetoric in dialogue with translingualism. Focusing on their objects of study and methods of inquiry, the article seeks to illustrate how comparative rhetoric and translingualism give voice and space to language and rhetorical practices that have been misrepresented, underrepresented, or not represented at all and how they together shed a new light on the imperative to teach, study, and speak with and for different rhetorical traditions and different language practices. Lately the field of WAC/WID, as well as the broader field of rhetoric and composition, has been grappling with issues related to linguistic and rhetorical diversity and to how to teach and speak with and for different language and rhetorical practices without either denying their discursive interconnectivities or unnecessarily conflating their discipline-specific characteristics (e.g., Zawacki and Cox, 2014). Several key questions have since become the focus of attention. For example, how can the field address linguistic and rhetorical differences in ways that do not rely on Euro-American-centric ideology for adjudication or affirmation? What new terms of engagement should/can be developed to move beyond such ideology and to recognize and appreciate the significance of occasions and practices of language use in meaningmaking and in identify formation? How can we as teachers of writing and rhetoric effectively challenge relations of power asymmetry in discursive engagements and respond to different languages and rhetorics in the classroom? What should we exactly do when confronted with difference in language and rhetorical practices? Should we sweep them under the rug by appealing to the purported utility and value of the Western Rhetorical Tradition or Standard English in the name of a generic “academic writing?” The flip side of this approach focuses on the forms difference takes and using the Western Rhetorical Tradition or Standard English to pit them against one another. Or should we direct our attention to such questions as: “What might this difference do? How might it function expressively, rhetorically, and communicatively? For whom, under what conditions, and how” (Horner et al., 2011, pp. 303-304)? These and other related questions have so far energized the WAC/WID specifically as well as the broader field of rhetoric and composition, and generated a growing number of compelling responses to date. Comparative rhetoric and translingualism are two cases which illustrate the stakes for WAC/WID. Each has offered us a way forward in response to these questions, and each has further illustrated the importance of studying discursive practices on their own terms to the global making of languages and