Seminar Leaders
Romeo García, University of Utah: romeo.garcia@utah.edu
LuMing Mao, University of Utah: luming.mao@utah.edu
Hua Zhu, University of Utah: hua.zhu@utah.edu
The turn to non-Western rhetorics has been an exercise in confronting and unsettling a Western epistemology, perspective, and project that has long dominated rhetorical studies. Yet, such a turn risks reinforcing the dualism of the West and the rest and what all this entails. Today, a decolonial agenda and comparative rhetoric offers an-other option. Against the backdrop of the unavoidable modern/colonial world system, decolonial and comparative rhetoric can bring together the analytic of coloniality, the prospective task of epistemic delinking and epistemological decolonization, the rhetoric of in/commensurability, the fluidity of interdependence, and pluriversality, mobilizing a critique and possible transformation of rhetorical studies.
For decades, scholars such as Bagele Chilisa, Linda Smith, Shawn Wilson, and Walter Mignolo have advocated that our research and our scholarly ethos need to be decolonized in order to reimagine and practice the dissemination of knowledge and relational exchanges otherwise. Meanwhile, comparative rhetoric advances by extricating itself from ethnocentrism, essentialism, and dualism and by moving towards re/contextualization, plural local terms, and discursive third (or forth, etc.) (Lloyd; Lyon; Mao; You; Wang). Comparative thinking is resonant with decolonial epistemology, and particularly, the understanding of culture (as contact zone), local (as sociohistorical and networked), subjectivity (as living and co-growing), and hybridity (as unstable and happening). Together, decolonial studies and comparative rhetoric appeal to us to change the terms and contents of conversation.
The seminar will: (1) Provide an interdisciplinary overview of comparative and decolonial studies; (2) Facilitate discussions on how we may form allyship among comparative and decolonial studies; and (3) Examine what makes comparative thinking and decolonial epistemology play their distinct roles in studying global rhetorics. Prospective participants will be asked to describe their current research and how it may relate to global rhetorics as well as identify two goals for the seminar.
Note: This seminar has limited space for remote participation.
Romeo García (PhD, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, Syracuse University) is Assistant Professor of Writing & Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. García’s research and teaching includes multi-sited inquiries into where hauntings (e.g., settler colonialism, coloniality, modernity/coloniality) are at, how they have unfolded at varying scales, and what its consequences are in the everyday. His research appears in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Across the Disciplines, The Writing Center Journal, Community Literacy Journal, and constellations. He is co-editor (with Damián Baca) of Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise, winner of the 2020 Conference on College Composition & Communication Outstanding Book Award (Edited Collection). García current interests include settler archives.
LuMing Mao is Professor and Chair of the Department of Writing & Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. He also serves as Director of Global U Humanities Summer Program for the University and Director of International Initiatives in the College of Humanities. Located in the intersections of rhetoric, culture, philosophy, and linguistics, Mao’s scholarship is centered on studying symbolic practices across time and space through a comparative lens. His more recent publications include editing three symposia on rhetoric and writing in Contemporary Rhetoric (2016, 2018, and 2021). He is a co-editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing. He is currently co-editing, with Daniel Gross and Steve Mailloux, Cambridge History of Rhetoric Vol 5.
Hua Zhu (PhD, Composition and Rhetoric, Miami University) is Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. Her research lies at the intersections of comparative rhetoric, non-Eurocentric history of rhetoric, and transnational writing pedagogies. Her work appears in The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics, China Media Research, Rhetorica, and Composition Forum, and is forthcoming in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Her book-in-progress draws upon practices of speaking to power in early China and develops a rhetorical theory to rethink power subversion in global contact zones.