Public speaking goes to China: cultural discourses of circulation

Abstract

Cultural discourse theory’s (CDT) strength is accounting for cultural differences between historically transmitted expressive systems. In its current form, the theory is not set up to account for the mobility of particular communication practices across cultural boundaries. Relying on CDT’s conception of communication practices as discursive resources for social interaction, we extend the theory’s explanatory power by investigating how speakers constitute the value and movements of a particular resource: the speech genre of public speaking. We performed a cultural discourse analysis (CuDA) of public speaking’s circulation between the United States and China to show that value ascriptions constituted divergent cultural discourses of circulation together with key symbols (such as “localization” and suzhi) and explicit metacultural commentary. These cultural discourses have an accelerative function on the dissemination side of circulation, and an integrative function on the replication side. Thus, cultural discourses of circulation communicatively constitute the mobility of particular discursive resources.