Poster for lecture at Kanagawa University, April 19, 2024Overview
As an English teacher in China once remarked, “It is often said that those who visit China for a week write a book about it. Those who stay for a month write an article. And those who live here a year or more—write nothing” (Maley 102). Much of my research has grown out of my personal experience of living in another country for sixteen years and my resultant hesitancy to answer the often-asked question, “What is Taiwan like?” I have noticed how making statements about Taiwan has become increasingly difficult for me over the years, which has led me to wonder about how writers decide when and how to make representations of other cultures. My research, therefore, focuses on (written) representation of self and other across cultures and is driven by the following kinds of questions:
- How do writers decide when they are ready to represent another culture?
- What are the ethical implications of such a decision?
- How are individual writers’ representations of self and other embedded in larger sociopolitical contexts, and how do those representations and contexts interact with each other?
- How are those representations eventually used?
Whether the writers who become the subjects of my study are students, teachers, diplomats, and/or novelists, I view their writing as carrying what compositionist Mary Juzwik has termed “moral heaviness” (552). Based in Bakhtin’s early work, Juzwik’s articulation of an “ethics of answerability” emphasizes “the unique and heavy responsibilities that individuals face as they respond to others in everyday interaction and in textual production” (536). I wish to extend Juzwik’s observations beyond the realm of classroom-based research and into other places where writing is doing the answerable work of representation.
Past Work on Chinese Rhetoric and Writing about Taiwan
My focus on representation, its uses, and its ethics has intersected with my interests in Chinese rhetoric and the history of postwar Taiwan. In a 2004 conference paper, “The French Invention of Chinese Rhetoric?,” I traced the process of how Western perspectives on Chinese rhetoric were influenced by shifts in conceptions of Western rhetoric itself. In an article published in 2007, entitled “Empathy and Its Others: The Voice of Asia, A Pail of Oysters, and the Empathetic Writing of Formosa,” I focused on the ethical implications of the ways that two books, by James Michener and Vern Sneider, depict empathetic listening and authoring by Americans in the context of Cold War Asia. Growing out of my dissertation work, my 2010 article “Difficult Writing: Representation and Responsibility in Narratives of Cross-Cultural Encounters” focused on how some participants in a cross-cultural teaching program in Taiwan confronted the difficulties involved in translating embodied experiences in a foreign country into fixed–yet answerable–textual representations of intercultural encounters.
My concern here, and in more recent work, is with how writing changes as it is taken up by different, sometimes unintended audiences. My scholarly introductions to the new editions of Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed and Vern Sneider’s 1953 novel, A Pail of Oysters, suggest that what is typically referred to as the “reception” of a work is itself a rhetorical act that is more accurately referred to in terms of “circulation,” where “bodies, artifacts, words, pictures, and other things flow within and across cultures to affect meaningful change” (Gries 7). In my introductions to the two abovementioned books, I wrote of the “afterlives” of these works, including the effects their publication had on their authors and the effects of their translation into Mandarin (and written Taiwanese, in the case of Oysters) on their participation in the continuing work of publicly re-membering Taiwan’s martial law period. My own research on these works has itself participated in that public memory through presentations I have given to public audiences in the US, Taiwan, and Japan (soon!).
Past Work about Multilingual University Students
Consideration of circulation of bodies as well as words has also grounded the work my Writing Program colleagues and I have done about multilingual students at Northeastern. Concern with students’ post-graduation professional trajectories led me to view the local (or perhaps translocal) work of my writing class in terms of larger trends in migration. Research that my colleagues and I have done has helped me develop that thinking further. In two co-authored book chapters, we have explored how superdiversity–a sociological concept initially used to describe patterns of migration in post-Cold War Europe that are characterized by mobility, complexity, and unpredictability (Vertovec)—can be used to understand the increasingly multifaceted identities that we present and are presented with in writing classrooms and the writing center. In the first chapter, one of the first published works in the discipline to use the concept of superdiversity to study university student populations, we situated Writing Program curricular changes and research initiatives pertaining to multilingual writers in the context of the “diversification of diversity” at Northeastern (Hollinger 12), observing that “[t]he challenge is not merely to meet students where they are but to investigate in meaningful ways where they might be and to use that information in creating curriculum and pedagogical interventions.” (Benda et al., “Confronting” 96, emphasis added). In the most recent chapter, we have addressed that challenge more, exploring the implications of superdiversity on how we work with students in writing classrooms and in the writing center. As we wrote in the conclusion, “Superdiversity as a theoretical perspective allows us to focus on the choices we have to position ourselves in relation to one another, including how we represent ourselves and each other in everyday classroom interactions or tutoring sessions” (Benda et al., “Confronting … Again”). These concerns and the way we talk about them have circulated between classroom spaces and research spaces: my teaching has benefitted from better understanding students, or at least from better understanding the need to understand students, and our research–especially on this second chapter–has benefitted from the opportunity to view those classroom or writing center encounters and the identities created through such encounters through a lens that connects them to larger scale patterns of global migration.
Current Work
I am currently at work on two articles. The first updates and develops a previous conference paper on the implications of Taiwan for the study of Chinese rhetoric. The second is an archives-based paper on former diplomat George H. Kerr’s studies of and advocacy for Taiwan in the early years of the Cold War. In their own different ways, these studies both continue my inquiries concerning representation and circulation, adding the issue of scholarship and/vs. advocacy to the mix. Both of these articles have been a long time in development (particularly the first, which I first presented on in 2005!), but the Kerr article has been accepted with revisions (which I hope to do over the summer of 2024). Stay tuned…
Works Cited
Benda, Jonathan, Michael Dedek, Chris Gallagher, Kristi Girdharry, Neal Lerner, and Matt Noonan. “Confronting Superdiversity in U.S. Writing Programs.” The Internationalization of US Writing Programs. Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser, eds. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2018.
Benda, Jonathan, Cherice Escobar Jones, Mya Poe, and Alison Y.L. Stephens. “Confronting Superdiversity Again: A Multidimensional Approach to Teaching and Researching Writing at a Global University.” James Rushing Daniel, Katie Malcolm, and Candice Rai, eds. Writing Across Difference: Theory and Intervention (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2022.
Juzwik, Mary. “Toward an Ethics of Answerability: Reconsidering Dialogism in Sociocultural Literacy Research.” College Composition and Communication 55.3 (2004): 536-67.
Gries, Laurie E. “Introduction: Circulation as an Emergent Threshold Concept.” Laurie E. Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke, eds. Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2018.
Hollinger, David A. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. Revised ed. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003.
Maley, Alan. “XANADU—‘A Miracle of Rare Device’: The Teaching of English in China.” Culture Bound: Bridging the Culture Gap in Language Teaching. Ed. Joyce Merrill Valdes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 102-111.
Michener, James. The Voice of Asia. NY: Random House, 1951.
Sneider, Vern. A Pail of Oysters. NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1953.
Vertovec, Steven. “Super-Diversity and Its Implications.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30.6 (2007): 1024–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870701599465.