Comparative Rhetorics

For a thorough overview of comparative rhetorics, read An Annotated Bibliography of Global and Non-Western Rhetorics: Sources for Comparative Rhetorical Studies

This section of the 8170 website needs to be longer and the other cultures represented here should also be represented elsewhere on this website; however, there is so much material to cover [4000 years of world history and many, many languages, none of which I have] that I've been intimidated. The two Classical Chinese pieces in this section have been on the syllabus since before the year 2000, that much at least I can claim.

But with the publication of The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics, which contains articles written by two graduates of GSU's rhetcomp program, Anne Melfi and Xiaobo (Belle) Wang, and a citation for a third, David Hutto, I'm encouraged. For now at least this section will be mostly an elaborated bibliography. Truth be told, this whole website and my articles and books are just elaborated bibliographies. Well, maybe not Writing Online.

Rhetoric is a human phenomenon, if by rhetoric we mean the study and application of how words influence thought and action. The word rhetoric is Greek but every culture and sub-culture has language-based methods for influencing its members as well as other linguistic methods for positively and negatively influencing (attracting and repelling) outsiders. It would be hasty, however, to label "rhetorical" those features of other cultures' texts that seem rhetorical to us, as we might well be overlaying our thinking on top of theirs and thus distorting theirs and perhaps ours as well. The problem of unintentional distortion is why one group should never presume to speak for (or imagine they have insight into) another. A consequence of this belief is that rhetoric and composition needs to be finding and encouraging people from non-European cultures and educational backgrounds to write and talk about how words work in their languages and cultures.

A second consequence is that we need to apply the exclusionary label "arhetorical" carefully because our default definitions of rhetoric carry significant cultural, largely androcentric European, assumptions about what rhetoric is or ought to be and seeing as arhetorical something intended to persuade denies its agency and intent in our world. Feeling justified in refusing to listen -- to pathologize or condescend or ridicule or cancel -- is perhaps the greatest threat to civilization. Just as history is propaganda, sometimes unintentionally, so too is theorizing.

As a way of fleshing out this warning to avoid intellectual imperialism or colonialization, which I am asserting is a fundamental tenet of comparative rhetorics, I want to contrast overtly "Greek" I've placed Greek in quotations marks here to draw attention to the fact that labels over-simplify reality. When I write "Greek" I'm really referring to a construct composed of books written by and about Athens in the 5th and 4th century BCE primarily as well the influential people who lived or visited there in those days. There were also people writing about rhetoric in Rhodes and also in Halicarnasus. They were not Athenian but they contributed to what we think of when we say "Greek," as did all the Europeans who wrote about "Greek" rhetoric later. The word "Roman" is similarly misleading as is "American" or "Canadian" or "Chinese." No people are all one thing. We think of "Greek" culture, for example, as highly androcentric, and it was, but the Romans called them effete and effeminate. It's not that the Romans were more "manly;" it's just that they had in common the tendency to use sexual representation as a tool for inclusion and exclusion, just as in the 1950s in America a person might call a boy a "sissy" for exhibiting some dispreferred behavior and the same behavior of that boy's grandson might have elicited the word fa**g0t. rhetoric with its shadow (Gk. skia) or perhaps its reflection, what we might call the rhetoric of the oppressed.

Greek rhetoric, as you will recall, is predicated on political equality, on isonomia, isologia, and parrhesia, the ideals that underwrite any man's [sic] right to speak and listen fearlessly to any other man in their city. Wealth didn't matter. And political status beyond citizenship didn't matter either. These democratic pillars are represented by Greek words, but it would be wrong to conclude that democracy is fundamentally Greek. Whereever free speech and equality of opportunity and law exists, public discussion and decision making flourishes. As Amartya Sen explains, "The Greek and Roman Heritage on public discussion is rightly celebrated, but the importnace attached to public deliberation also has a remarkable history in India." The Argumentative Indian: Writing on Indian History Culture and Identity. This rhetorical context is sometimes called radical democracy and at Athens it existed only intermittently. There was a constant struggle between people [citizen males] who believed the city best run by the wealthy and educated (aristocrats) or even just the rich and influential, strong men, (oligarchs) and those men who thought power best distributed equally among all (democrats). Although, again, from our perspective, not actually "all." Women of all descriptions and slaves and foreigners of all genders were never given a voice or thought worth listening to, at least not publicly. And therefore, by the Greek definition of disputation among equals in a public setting, they were arhetorical.

But the disempowered had methods of linguistic influence (what I think we need to identify as a rhetoric even though it is clearly not rhetoric in the sense of political discourse) and the Greeks knew it. They just didn't write about it directly because the strategies of the weak were considered unmanly, the worst aspersion one Greek could cast on another. Our word courage comes from the Latin corage which meant heart and valor and spirit, etc. The Greek equivalent is andrea, manly. One of the most common topics in rhetorical handbooks is how to talk and carry yourself like a man. The tradition seems endlessly worried less its students seem in any way effeminate. Not only does this attitude exclude women from rhetorical acts, it requires all men speak and act in certain ways while excluding by emasculation (being labeled effeminate) all who can't or won't. The best discussion of manliness in rhetorical education I know of is Maude Gleason's Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome. If you want to see the remnants of the ancient commonplace in the current market place, google "making men". If you want to consult your own experience, when was the last time you heard an adult say to a boy in distress, "Shake it off" or "Man up"? They also tended to label as arhetorical or inappropriately rhetorical (mere rhetoric, hysteria, being dramatic) any attempt at persuasion that didn't conform to their values and expectations of manly behavior, an honorific only ever fully accorded citizens. Other Greek males might be accorded the honor for their deportment or speech, but they were never allowed direct access to power. Everyone who wasn't a Greek male was just a barbarian or a woman.

Importantly, in the hierarchy of manly behavior, rhetoric itself was dispreferred. Real men took what they wanted and only negotiated or made speeches and sought public support if they weren't strong enough to just take what they wanted or, gods forbid, if someone stronger took advantage of them. This is why it was standard practice to begin any speech with an apology for speaking at all. This is why Plato said rather than learning how to make persuasive speeches and thus win allies we should learn dialectic and thus obtain self-control and self-sufficiency. This is also why the second book of Aristotle's rhetoric is so important, because it explains how political friends are made and how the weak, impoverished, friendless, and inarticulate, are always wronged, because in essence, they deserve it.

And yet, at the same time, the Greeks admired anyone who could make their words "fly like snow." And in a literary context at least they also admired craftiness and cleverness, as in wiley Odysseus. If you needed craft and guile to escape the cave of a one-eyed-monster, your escape justified undignified behavior and the drama of your escape added to your heroism. Under duress, in a weak position from which direct confrontation was going to go badly, trickery, indirection, lies, seduction, innuendo, shocking indecorum, a whole host of "unmanly" rhetorical techniques were acceptable. These are the rhetorical tools of the oppressed, of those who have no place at the table, who aren't listened to or taken seriously. These tools, known but not acknowledged, are, as it were, the shadow cast by the rhetoric of public discourse among equals. If you are not equal and therefore by default disqualified, you have to work outside the law. The Greek words sophos and deinos had multiple meanings and those meanings intersect at clever or skilled, both double-edged. People who can do the expected better than expected are powerful and therefore both marvelous and potentially dangerous. A person who is both smart and unscrupulous is way more powerful than a smart person controlled by ethics because the later is predictable. The unscrupulous and therefore unpredictable person might be good or bad, depending on what boundaries they transgress. Doing the right thing isn't always the best thing, but that's the sort of thing a sophist would say. Today is Senator John Lewis's funeral, so I can't help but think of his advice to get into "the good kind of trouble".

Distrust of eloquence, the need to carefully control what counts and what doesn't, is not uniquely Greek. Every culture in the Western tradition has been suspicious of "rhetoric," often while praising specific kinds of rhetoric they called by other names. Suspicion of eloquence was also wide spread in what Westerners called the East. George Q. Xu provides a convincing overview in "The Use of Eloquence: The Confucian Perspective" (Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks). Silence and the careful cultivation of the right to speak was also promoted by Turkish peoples, according to Elif Guler. "An Overview of Kut and Tore as the Pillars of the Turkish Rhetorical Tradition." Chapter 10 in The Routledge Handbook.

In the Greek context, as an outsider, everything was against you as regards eloquence. You weren't given access to the ekklesia, obviously, but even to speak your mind or to offer unasked for advice might get you whipped or worse if you were inclined to keep it up.

If you were educated in public speaking in a city other than the one you found yourself living in, you could use your rhetorical skills but for display purposes only. You could draw a crowd in the agora as Gorgias and Protagoras and others did and maybe pick up a few students from among the wealthier and more ambitious youth, but you couldn't exert direct influence over public discourse. Your foreign accent would identify you as an outsider and arhetoricize your words.

We have in Han Fei Tzu's "The Difficulties of Persuasion" one relevant handbook for the disempowered unwilling to live in silence. I won't summarize it here because we will read it momentarily. What's important to understand going in is that whereas Greek rhetoric stems from, theoretically at least, the rhetorical context of radical democracy, the rhetoric represented by Tzu stems from an absolute imbalance of power, a would-be councilor seeking to influence an emperor who might kill them on the spot for any or no reason at all. We also have books about etiquette and the life of the courtier which have similar rhetorical contexts in that at court there is an all powerful leader, just as in the dynasties to which Tzu refers. And we have other shadow rhetorics from which we can learn as well. It has become commonplace to assert that Guiguzi (Master of the Ghost Valley), 400-320 BCE, is China's first treatise on rhetoric. According to Hui Wu, "Guiguzi primarily teaches the powerless how to overpower the powerful." "From Oratory to Writing: An Overview of Chineses Classical Rhetoric (500 BCE - 220 CE)" in The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics

The primary premise of all of these rhetorics is don't get caught trying to influence because you aren't allowed to be influential. You will be ridiculed or abused or punished if you try and anyway you don't have what it takes (voice, accent, gesture, etc.) to be eloquent and therefore listened to.

"We aren't going to win playing by the written rules," as Stacy Abram's explains in Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change, one of the best recent books on the rhetoric of the disenfranchised I've read. "We cannot fight a war with resources we don't possess so we must inventory what we do have and figure out how to use them in unexpected ways."

The Monkey of The Signifying Monkey who is abused by Lion tricks Elephant into attacking Lion so as to safely get revenge. It doesn't end well for Monkey.Henry Louis Gates. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. YouTube search for Signifying Monkey to hear various renditions of the African (?) fable itself. Using someone else to do what you can't or don't want to be seen doing is known as The Cat's Paw technique. You can find a quick list of these sorts of rhetorical techniques in The 48 Laws of Power, which most people read with a sense of ethical outrage but that's because most people want to believe the world is run by reason and don't see reason as another tool of power. I've shared hiring committees with people who insist they want only to hire "the right person for the job" but can't see that the criteria that identify the "right person" inevitably lead to another white man (or woman -- "achievement" can trump gender) getting the nod. These people don't think they are tribalist, but they also don't understand how tribalism works or how the antidotes to exclusion require accepting as equal people who aren't at all like you. If the rules entail failure for some, then the goal of inclusion requires we change the rules, but those who benefit from the rules as they are will, understandably if not justifiably, resist with violence if necessary because they can't think past their advantage (or privilege to use the currency); they don't believe the rules benefit some at the expense of others because they don't believe they have been given an advantage. This is why sophisticated skepticism is an important skill to learn. Because it encourages people to see past the obvious.

When the laws are unjust, breaking the law is justified. When the rules are corrupt, transgression is required. When the people in power think they alone speak and see the truth, lies and distortion and mere rhetoric are inevitable. When the people in power feel their power threatened, there are soldiers and blood in the streets.

Each rhetoric is the product of the expectations and interaction designs of the dominant culture and that to the extent the dominant depend on the dominated, there will always also be alternative or shadow rhetorics because trying to talk others into giving you what you want or need or even just recognizing you as you, is a human trait, not a cultural artifact.

As with pretty much every aspect of life, the only way to truly appreciate rhetoric is to travel, to experience other worlds and other ways of being. Absent the languages and resources such a persepctive requires, you can learn a great deal from travel guides (and from Cultures and Organizations, see below).

Some Compartive Rhetoric Anthologies

Below are some anthologies that will lead you to original sources and interpretations and translations of important sources written in languages you, perhaps, can't read.

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics: Studies in the History, Application, and Teaching of Rhetoric Beyond Traditional Greco-Roman Contexts. ed. Keith Lloyd. Routledge, 2021.

Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks. eds. Carol S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley. SUNY Press, 2004. (pdf)

Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics. eds. Carol S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley. Parlor Press, 2009.

Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction. George A Kennedy. Oxford UP, 1998.

Books on Rhetorics from Specific Non-Western Cultures

This is a very short list for now. And the first one on it isn't exactly a rhetoric, although of course that depends on your definition and I think it is a rhetoric of rhetorics because it has to do with how cultural default settings lead to specific responses to different situations. The authors call those settings the software to the hardware of our brains and they argue that the software is observable and predictable.

Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov. McGraw-Hill Education: 2010.

The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. Amartya Sen. Picador: 2006.

Chinese Perspectives in Rhetoric and Communication. ed. D. Ray Heisey. Alex Publishing: 2000.

"Guiguzi," China's First Treatise on Rhetoric: A Critical Translation and Commentary. Translated by Hui Wu / With Commentaries by Hui Wu and C. Jan Swearingen. SIU Press: 2016.