Campbell & Anzaldua

Rather than a single population, I saw one of the features of Campbell's and Anzaldua's contributions as including multiple populations. Campbell's identification of the rhetoric of women's liberation and women's advocacy as a genre that exclusively addresses women's rhetorical practices, including all women ("black women, welfare mothers, older women, factory workers, high school girls, journalists, unwed mothers, secretaries, and so forth") based in "a common condition, a radical form of 'consubstantiality' that is the genesis of the peculiar kind of identification they call 'sisterhood'" (131-32).  By including all women in her discussion of rhetorical practice, her contribution is congruent with a goal of women's advocacy: "illuminat[ing] a common condition that all women experience and share" (130).  While Campbell acknowledges niched experience and the interrelationship between the personal and the political, her scope includes all women, just women, and women generally.

On the other hand, Anzaldua is speaking from many positions and speaking to many positions. She is a woman, a chicana/mexicana, a resident of the Borderlands (metaphorical and literal), Mexican (metaphorical), a lesbian, and a feminist. She speaks from each of those perspectives separately in concert. And from those positions, she is able to reach/to speak to a range of linguistic practices, attitudes, and people through the issues embedded in the deep structure of language practices: histories of places and people, the natural (Earth), the body, and consciousness.

While reading Campbell and Anzaldua, I saw traces and contrasts between these authors and previous works that we've read. Contrasts first: Campbell's essay disregards most (maybe all) of the foundational works that we've read. Namely, she disregards Bitzer explicitly on the basis of "dual and conflicting exigencies" that "extend beyond the traditional boundaries of rhetorical acts," and Campbell challenges the underlying assumption in Aristotle's work, occasions arise where a rhetor can move an audience (133). Campbell writes, "It is a genre without a rhetor, a rhetoric in search of an audience" (134). However, to borrow a phrase from class, there are traces of a Foucaultian world in Campbell's work, because she is examining discourse based in material and social conditions that seeks to change those conditions, conditions that are based in discourse and restrict/constrain: "Exchange and communication are positive figures working inside complex figures of restriction, and probably would not be able to function independently of them" (Foucault 1468). Campbell's examination of stylistic features echoed Gates: style foregrounding and shaping discourse, and her emphasis on identification evoked Burke. In Anzaldua's work, I traced Campbell in terms of Alzaldua as an example of Campbell's theory. Anzaldua evoked the bridge metaphor like Bahktin. But what was most interesting was the sensual, sensory, and mystical properties of the work, which spoke to some of the better features of Phaedrus. 

However and in spite of some commonalities, these authors offer a rhetoric that is ethical, a rhetoric that advocates, and a rhetoric that includes places and bodies as both a cause and a central feature of discursive practices. This rhetoric is not based in a rhetor but in shared experience, gender, and genealogy. But what is perhaps the most interesting is that this rhetoric is personal, self-conscious and reflective. The line from the essay that Campbell cites, "It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head" and Anzaldua's Crossroads section are both examples of this kind. As opposed to other theories of rhetoric and rhetors, theories that are situated in large-scale practice and ideology, theories that are informed by generalized notions of audience, and theories that gaze to the metaphysical for truth, Campbell's and Anzaldua's rhetorics are radical and have much at stake for most of the world's people.