ablo Tac

Quechnajuichom

Significance: The Importance of California Natives

Amongthe Maidu,

Mono and Owens Lakes

Shastans

Miwoks and Yokuts

Costanoans

Chumash

with women and children as helpers.

engage in war.

The Gabrielino warriors usedheavy wooden clubs, reed armor, and bows and arrows.

acorns,obsidian, and deerskin

influenced by Catholicism in a syncretic way, mixing European and nativebeliefs, but it is unclear to what degree

believed the earthwas created by a divine brother and sister, who formed the first human,Wiyot, a male who was self-generating (he had children without a woman)

worshiped the god Qua-o-ar, also called Chingichngish.

a Cupan-speaking people. Part of the Uto-Aztecanfamily of languages, Cupan is linguistically related to languages of the PuebloIndians in New Mexico and the Aztecs of central Mexico

Los Angeles and OrangeA Closer Look: Six Regional Peoples 19

Gabrielino/Tongva

Sierra Nevada

Humboldt Bay

Sacramento or Stockton. The bay gives easy access to the fertileSonoma and Santa Clara Valleys

San Joaquin Rive

MorroBay

Los Angeles, San Gabriel, and San Fernando Valleys

North of Santa Barbara

Coast Range

an Francisco Bay

All of these systems grew out of this land of tremendous contrasts:

central and northern California.

as many as 300,000 peoplelived in California before the first European settlement

The native peoples in California were scattered and they spoke more than100 different language

NOMMO

Rhythm

proffers an Afrocentric model in which Nommo is graphi-cally posited as the center around which eight elements—rhythm,soundin’, stylin’, improvisation, storytelling, lyrical code, image mak-ing, and call and response

(1) signification, (2)personalization, (3) tonal semantics, and (4) sermonic tone

he modes are (1) call-response, a series of spontane-ous interactions between speaker and listener; (2) signification, the artof humorous put downs, usually through verbal indirection; (3) tonalsemantics, the conveying of meanings in Black discourse through spe-cifically ethnic kinds of voice rhythms and vocal inflections; and (4)

Females are seen as morereligious than males, and those less formally educated are seen as morereligious than those with more education.

a four-part thematic structure that is basic toBlack secular, agitational rhetors: (1) all Blacks face a common enemy,(2) there is a conspiracy to violate Black manhood, (3) there is perva-sive American hypocrisy, and (4) Black unity is requisite for Black lib-eration.

Legitimation

Mythication

Ob-jectification

Vilification

(1) vilification, (2) objectification, (3) mythication,and (4) legitimation.

one in which the optimistic notes precede the tragic

a distinct departure from Anglo-Saxon patterns of oratory

escapist adaptation to servitude. He ignores its rebellious, in some casesmultilayered, meanings

acceptance of stereotypes about “primitive” Africans who, restricted tothe “jungles of Africa,” lacked opportunities to develop sophistication.

no logical organization because there is little preparation.The emotions determine everything.

Personal Appeal:

Pipes classifies such preach-ing according to the following scheme derived from classical rhetoric:

the prevailing functional character of AfricanAmerican artistic expression renders problematic any move to divorceits production and any criticism thereof from the realm of rhetoricalinquiry

“Black rhetoric, with its con-centration on Nommo, rhythmical patterns, audience assertiveness, andso on, cannot be dealt with by simply applying the conventional Eu

The civil-rights leaders faced a formidable rhetorical prob-lem; several questions about their persuasion had to be an-swered: To whom was their persuasion to be directed? Seg-regationists? Moderate whites? Negroes? What form shouldthe protest take? What effect would the persuasion have onthe audience?

ctions themselves weredecidedly rhetorical in that campaign; the sit-ins, freedom rides, picket-ing, marches, wade-ins, read-ins, and jail-ins were perhaps the moreeffective forms of persuasion.

TO ENCAPSULATE ALL THE VARIOUS EFFORTS IN THE SCHOLARLYstudy of African American rhetoric would be a task virtually as daunt-ing as if the object were to summarize all reportage and analysis of theBlack experience overall

He argues that while Black oratorsused the same degree of induction, deduction, and causal reasoningemployed by White rhetors of similar training and educational levels,

The harder taskis to fulfill the requirement that the rhetoric be consistent with or over-come an audience’s mythology.

certain critical sacrifices.

ave asserted their collective humanity in the face of an endur-ing White supremacy and tried to persuade, cajole, and gain acceptancefor ideas relative to Black survival and Black liberation.

the dynamic, complexrelationship between language use and identity formation

As a rhetoric of becoming, Asian American rhetoric is also an exampleof hybridity. Operating in a space that is “crisscrossed with a variety of lan-guages, experiences, and voices” and that “intermingles with the weightof particular histories that will not fit into the master narrative of a mono-lithic culture” (Giroux 1992, 209), Asian American rhetoric draws upondiscursive practices both from the European American tradition and fromAsian, as well as other ethnic and worldly, traditions.

Therefore, to remember rhetorically, for Asian Americans, isto investigate histories that are formed through the transnational tiesamong Asia and the United States, and to trace and stitch togethermemories of seemingly disparate moments and cultural sites

tremendous

As the reader may have already noticed, we have chosen “Asian

Wethink often of these two encounters because they keep reminding us ofthe need to perform a narrative where Asian Americans, or any otherethnic minorities, for that matter, can use a language that, in the wordsof Gloria Anzaldúa, “they can connect their identity to, one capable ofcommunicating the realities and values true to themselves”

“‘Maybe I Could Play a Hookerin Something! Asian American Identity, Gender, and Comedy in theRhetoric of Margaret Cho,”

More specifically, Carroll sees their performances as recuperating theclassical rhetorical canon of delivery or “the language of the body.”

developed the rhetoric of self-resistance by articulating bicultural realities and by enacting the rolesand responsibilities they were committed to fulfilling in their work

“‘Artful Bigotry and Kitsch’: A Study of Stereotype,Mimicry, and Satire in Asian American T-Shirt Rhetoric,”

resistance or, more specifically, toward how Asian Americans use rheto-ric to combat misrepresentations and stereotypes and to develop rep-resentations for their very own that are directly based upon their ownexperiences as Other and upon their own struggles for political, racial,and linguistic justice

w Asian American feministrhetoric depends on alternative forms of institutional or public mem-ory, and how space, history, and memory intersect with one anotherto inform and constitute the articulation and performance of AsianAmerican rhetoric

Ong

The seven chapters in the first section of this book all center o

. Rather, we want to use this kind of grouping to furtherforeground two major themes that have emerged from these chaptersand that are so central to the understanding and development of AsianAmerican rhetoric.

many separate national identities will inevitably inflect orintrude upon the making of Asian American rhetoric

n, to dismantle those struc-tures that act to maintain cultural control either through discourses ofdominance (such as explicit legal restrictions against Asians and AsianAmericans) or through the more subtle hegemonic acts of educationaland cultural production that define what it means to be a citizen

Asian American rhetoric becomes a rhetoric of becom-ing: it is a rhetoric that participates in this generative process, yieldingan identity that is Asian American and producing a transformative effectthat is always occasioned by use

“Words have histories. They have been in otherpeople’s mouths and on other people’s pens. They have circulated otherDiscourses and within other institutions. They have been part of specifichistorical events and episodes. Words bring with them as potential situatedmeanings all the situated meanings they have picked up in history and inother settings and Discourses”

, rhetoric is seen as more than just theart of discovering the available means of persuasion. Rather, it is part ofthe knowledge-making process that is situated in every specific occasionof language use and that is always socially and politically constructed

Third

hetoric—the systematic and effectiveuse of symbolic resources—was not an Anglo-American phenomenononly, and that the use and study of rhetoric existed in other com-munities and in other regions around the world.

Secon

makes it possible forAsian American rhetoric, or any other ethnic rhetoric, for that matter,to find its voice and to secure its uptake.

both been mobilized by, and directly participatesin, an ongoing dialogue that aims to reexamine and reconceptualizerhetoric’s purposes and functions beyond the paradigm of western rhet-oric.

factors that have been converging in the recent past.

particularizing speech settings, specific communicative purposes,and situated discursive acts.

LuMing Mao

Ronald L. Jackson II

The ensuing years have seen feminist scholars take up this work in earnest,with their explorations largely falling into two dynamic categories.

Enoch

“the uses of language in the play of power”

Our ethosis formed in part by the questions we ask

Vicki Tolar Burton

Octalog

importance of creative research methodologies,what constitutes evidence, who and what should be included in our histories, andhow researchers’ positions and goals affect their interpretations.

Octalogs have provided a space for exploring varied notionsconcerning rhetoric’s role in serving a common good and assessing the con-tentious nature of that undertaking.

k entails (1) telling stories in order to texturiexperience of the viewer and to bring substance and greater corporethe area so that viewers can have an enhanced capacity to perceimake sense of perceptions, (2) historicizing (using the combination oftelling and history-telling) based on new perceptions in order to enrground of engagement, and (3) using this re-formed interpretive frawork to re-consider data - that is, to re-envision the landscape, to seeto understand what's visible in more dynamic ways, and to develtheories

achiev

ric. One c

above: Westernness, in that they are historically linked to Africa; maleness, in that they are women; and elitenesin that they are a historically oppressed group in terms of race, class, geder, and cul

the fact that her tablets were written in cuneiform, one of the very ear-liest forms of written language. A

Enheduanna is a successful storyteller and poet whose writings livedon with cultural significance for generations beyond her death. More

hese poems demonstrate that Enheduanna was indeed an astuterhetorical decision-maker and a persuasive cultural leader. C

a as the first author in all of world literatureknown to be a historical figure and identified by name in the actual literaryartifact. In a poem entitled "Lady of Largest Hear

opportunity and created anential position for h

centuries. A challenge f

s. She identifies among this group, for example, Hatshepsut(from Ancient Egypt between 1501-1447 b.c.e.) and Makeda, Queen ofSheba (from Ethiopia in c. tenth century b

ys, not only the ideological and philosophical frameworksof a particular group of African American women, but also rhetorical prac-tices that speak directly to the contours of their gendered, racialized, andeconomically defined experi

ology among literary traditions, rather thanrhetorical traditio

nsanity, tha

gy, Margaret Busby brought together an international ction (over 200 pieces) of words and writings by

territories, with a focus on women,with the possibility that eliteness may or may not hold its viabilityvariations in rhetorical perf

ese terms were conabl

question, "

normed understanding are not

practices have built up a high intoto the assigning of value and credibility to any site, focal point, thepractice other than those whose contours are already sanctionedcally within the circle of unde

re called upon to creat

of other lives face a

ces. Twenty-five hundred years of rhetorical scholarship(as inscribed by the names of highly respected rhetorical figures fromSocrates to Kenneth Burke and beyond) are, in fact, testament of Westerndominance in interpretive authority and of the situating of that authority inThis content downloaded from146.244.101.138 on Tue, 27 Jan 2026 20:30:03 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

ast the legacies o

How do we demonstrate in the history of rhetoric that we are cogni-zant of and informed by the knowledge that a territory, even an abstractedand often stylized domain of an intellectual territory, is endowed by vari-ous contingencies, as well as various dimensions of materiality? How dowe make evident an understanding that the textures created by such vari-ability can be brought to dynamic relief, enhanced, appreciated, and flex-ibly configured and reconfigured in valuation processes and inknowledge-making processes? Further, how do we bring such an under-standing to bear in an academic domain such as rhetorical history wherethere is a deeply entrenched habit of standing in one place (that is, in terri-tories deemed Western), shaping inquiries with a particular set of interestsin mind (for example, the desires and experiences of elite males), and in-terestingly disregarding some features even within its own scope (for ex-ample, the desires and experiences of women or people from non-eliteclasses)? How do we engage in such endeavors with Western rhetorics,when these traditions of theory and practice have tended to function with aheavy and relentlessly constraining

by, to articulate the limitationsof historical and current practices and the scholarship produced by suchpractices; to sustain perspectives that assume, rather than minimize, a fullerterrain where other views participate kaleidoscopically in the knowledge-making process; and to establish a more generous accreditation systemcapable of accounting for a more richly endowed rhetorical landscape andfor more dynamic possibilities for understanding that lan

practices. Inrecognizing knowledge as an interpretive enterprise, a social construction,the imperative becomes the task of connecting theory with scholarly actionin order to both theorize and engage in other scholarly activities more sys-tematical

ecades that we actually create andfilter meaning from more elaborate perceptive possibilities, making senseof what we see based on ideological frameworks and social

as Burke, Foucault, G

al one, that knowledge is lesstruth for all time, space, and conditions than it is interp

A second challenge is to understand on an o

Oneis to recognize that whatever we currently know about rhetorical history asa disciplinary landscape is situated on a larger terrain of developed andundeveloped possibilities

two provocative challenges.

select, focus, and fine-tun

ontingent more generally onperception and more specifically on the limitations of perception.

e landscape. We select, focus, anddevelop, bringing more clearly and vibrantly into view particular featuresthat we frame and foreground, while simultaneously disregarding or mini-mizing other features and dimensions that we might have selected, devel-oped, and showcased instea

alues, preferences, beliefs.

an interpretive one

where on the land-scape we stand and what we have in mind.

Have you reallylistened hard enough, deeply enough, to your target here?" And theanswer is too often, "No."

What is inescapable is that underlying all our differences aboutwhat makes good communication there is one deep standard: agree-ment that whatever the dispute, whatever the language standards,communication can be improved by listening to the other side, and thenlistening even harder to one's own responses.

for him much ofwhat they publish is no more than rhetrickery.

Even in large loosely defined fields like English, wherepeople quarrel about discourse norms, there are underlying" "warrants or "commonplaces" that are taken for granted as notrequiring discussion;

What makes good rhetoric onthe front page of your local newspaper will differ sharply from thestyle of the sports section or business section or editorial page

every society shares some rhetorical standards, while actuallypossessing a variety of sub-domains with different standards.

Everybody obeys differentstandards depending on audience differences

"rhetorical domain," narrow orbroad: the community that preaches and practices rhetorical standardsthat contrast sharply with the standards embraced by those in otherdomains."

This is why thequality of our citizenry depends on whether their education hasconcentrated on the productive forms of rhetorical engagement

all three of these can have effects on the other two, butthe distinction can be quite useful, both as the rhetor tries to decidewhat to say and as the critic of rhetoric tries to decide whether a givenrhetorical stroke deserves praise.

Epideictic

Forensic

Deliberative

it is not just that rhetoric makes many realities: study ofrhetorical issues is our best resource for distinguishing the goodmakings from the bad

And meanwhile it creates a multiplicity of judgments about whatthe realities really are.

rhetoric makes realities, however tempor:ary.

We may not want to call the realities made by rhetoric "objective,"because we always have only our "subjective" pictures of them

call for more open acknowledgment of how rhetoric is to bepraised, or blamed, for the makings

Our speech codesare changed daily by how we obey or violate them.

Our lives are oftenoverwhelmed by such rhetorical changes of reality

the full actualities of Nature being studied do not change simplybecause scientific rhetoric changes.

make Reality One, UnchangeableTruths. It aids us in discovering them, as it makes and remakesour circumstances and beliefs — our temporary realities — alongthe way

converts more and more into believing them.

discovers innumerable unconditional truths

but by the way you and your spousediscussed what to do about it and whether you are now cheerful orgloomy.

rhetoric has created many temporary realities

it is important to repeat that current critics ofrhetoric are wrong when they tie it to the claim that everything istotally contingent.

Can you join me in claiming that no amount of futurerhetoric will justify slavery, even if this or that culture becomesconvinced that it is needed and thus justified? 1

always wrong,

rhetoric is needed to change minds about suchtruths

Slavery will always be wrong, no matter how many culturespractice it.

Only explanations offered about mycarelessness or anger in dropping the cup depend on rhetoric.

it is clear that rhetoric makes a vast part of ourrealities."

These synonyms dramatize once again why rhetoric has no singleterritory but covers almost everything, including the ethicaljudgments we come to in chapter 3.

, rhetorology, for thisdeepest practice of LR: not just distinguishing defensible and in-defensible forms of rhetoric but attempting to lead both sides in anydispute to discover the ground they share - thus reducing pointlessdispute. ? This point becomes the center of the final chapter.

Everyday language includesmany synonyms for defensible rhetoric:

rhetoric covers what others call "EnglishStudies," "Composition Studies," "Communication Studies," or"Speech and Communication."

he always at least implied thatit had to be central to any inquiry about thinking.

S nice" rhetorical terms are so ambiguous, it will be useful to relythiotiKliont on the following summary of the distinctions Tyè

rhetorician

rhetor

Rhetorologist

Rhetorician

Rhetor

Rhetorology

Rhetrickery:

how to practice listening-rhetoric (LR)

Yet we all often travel under the sameterm: "My field is rhetoric."

I see no escape from that ambiguity. But we can at least distinguishthe rhetor — each of us, in and out of the academy, saying or writingthis or that to produce some effect on some audience — from therhetorician, the would-be scholar who studies the most effective formsof communication.

"So you are a preacher of the artsthat have nothing to do with truth, only persuasion? Do you deservea professorship here for doing that?"

it muddies the distinction betweenthe art of rhetoric and the study of the art

t much ofwhat we find repulsive is a form of rhetoric

"the art of removing misunderstanding" but also thesymbolic arts of producing misunderstanding.

doesn't it become meaningless, pointless? Surely youcannot claim that the shoddy rhetoric people object to shouldn't becalled rhetoric

. Even works by professional rhetoricians areoften deliberately mislabeled. A colleague recently informed me thathis last three books, all of them originally employing "rhetoric" intheir titles, had been retitled by the publishers, since rhetorical termswould downgrade the text and reduce sales!

still have no reference to rhetoric at all,

rhetoricians still represent a tinyminority on the academic scene.

it can in itself be a mode of genuine inquiry

"Rhetoric is that which creates an informed appetite for thegood." (Richard Weaver, 1948)• "Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, afunction that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: theuse of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation inbeings that by nature respond to symbols." (Kenneth Burke,1950)• "Rhetoric is the art of discovering warrantable beliefs andi mproving those beliefs in shared discourse ... the art of probingwhat we believe we ought to believe, rather than proving what istrue according to abstract methods." (Wayne Booth, 1964)• "Rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct applica-tion of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse whichchanges reality through the mediation of thought and action."(Lloyd Bitzer, 1968)• " We should not neglect rhetoric's importance, as if it were simplya formal superstructure or technique exterior to the essentialactivity. Rhetoric is something decisive in society.... [T]hereare no politics, there is no society without rhetoric, without theforce of rhetoric." (Jacques Derrida, 1990)• "Rhetoric is the art, practice, and study of [all] human communi-cation." (Andrea Lunsford, 1995)• "Rhetoric appears as the connective tissue peculiar to civil societyand to its proper finalities, happiness and political peace hic etnunc." ( Marc Fumaroli, 1999

rhetoric and dialectic overlap

rhetrickery

even at best it is no more than ourresource for jazzing up or bolstering ideas derived elsewhere

(note Locke's useof "the fair sex"!

Rhetoric's Status: Up, Down, and ó Up?• "Rhetoric is the science of speaking well, the education of theRoman gentleman, both useful and a virtue." (Quintilian)• "Rhetoric is the art of expressing clearly, ornately (where neces-sary), persuasively, and fully the truths which thought hasdiscovered acutely." (St. Augustine)• "Rhetoric is the application of reason to imagination for thebetter moving of the will. It is not solid reasoning of the kindscience exhibits." (Francis Bacon