A New Way of Seeing

Although I planned to say that rhetoric is undoubtedly changed with the addition of a new population, I think that I’m more inclined to borrow Travis’ verb and say that rhetoric is “expanded” with the addition of a new population. Although expansion can be considered a change, I think the question “Is rhetoric changed?” connotes a more extreme degree of change. When I think of the field being changed, I think of rhetoric post-Ramus, or at the advent of New Rhetoric. These periods make me think of Burke’s alchemy metaphor; during those times, the field was melted to magma and then reshaped. After Astell, or Gates, or Anzaldua, I don’t think the field was reverted to magma and reshaped; instead, I think someone took a microfiber cloth and cleaned up our terministic screen so we could see new things that we were missing before. 

I think it’s interesting that Signifyin(g) seems to bring back elements of the Sophists. When Gates quoted Mezzrow and H. Rap Brown to talk about Signifyin(g) as “a form of rhetorical training,” where the focus is “not specifically what is said, but how.” Made me think back to Lysias in Phaedrus. In the excerpt of Brown playing the dozens, he’s not actually out to make the listener hate himself, or think that his mother is really promiscuous, he’s just out to best his opponent in a game of wits, in the same way that Lysias or the sophists were out to “win” an argument (but usually for money).

Although I don’t think that this work necessarily changes the field, I do, however, think that the addition of new populations to the field of rhetoric works to change people’s perceptions about certain races or cultures. For a very long time, AAVE and African Vernacular Tradition were thought of as being bastardizations of “standard English” and were, and in some cases still are, used by some as proof of the inferiority of an entire race of people. Work by scholars like Labov and Gates shows us that AAVE and AVT are not bastardizations of “standard english” and are instead incredibly complex and have interesting origins. Their work not only changed the way we think about AAVE and AVT, I think it opened up the door for Anzaldua to write about mestiza rhetoric, which in turn opens the door for others to write about the rhetoric of other marginalized cultures.