subject: Engaging the Other: Studying Chinese Rhetoric: in Global Contact Zones [print this page] Any attempt to interrogate what and the where, and to examine the complex relationship between the importantly present and the other, would not be complete without taking the present into account. Most immediately, we must reflect on the influence of today's global contact zones on the study of Chinese rhetoric as our ongoing dialogues across national, political, and linguistic boundaries are fostering a more multifaceted, if at times conflicted, understanding of rhetorical formations. Studying Chinese rhetoric, it should be clear by now, is fraught with historical ideological and methodological tensions, and it cannot help but proceed through the terministic screen of today's global contact zones.
In her much-cited "Arts of the Contact Zone," Mary Louise Pratt defines contact zones Links Of London Bracelets as "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power". Pratt has further argued that complex relationships and creative energies can emerge or evolve from these discursive encounters that are frequently perilous to the indigenous. Today's global contact zones, while still very much involving the clashing of cultures, have taken on new characteristics largely brought on by a global economy and a technological revolution, both of which have smashed old barriers and also erected new ones.
If Pratt's contact zones call attention to colonial and colonizing discursive encounters, today's global contact zones are marked by an unprecedented sense of interdependence and interconnectivity, hierarchical and asymmetrical relations of power and nationalistic sentiments notwithstanding. In other words, in our global contact zones, different discursive acts come in contact or collision with each other to secure uptake and to compete for audience and dominance within and across the borders of the nation-state. In Pratt's contact zones, it is the indigenous that select, appropriate, or even transform the idiom of the metropolis or the conqueror to bring about self-representation and to exercise authority and independence. In the global contact zones, it is no longer just the indigenous that perform these creative acts. Rather, the communication between the importantly present (the West) and the other (the indigenous) is multidirectional and even disjointed. In the words of Joseph Chan and Bryce Mclntyre, it is "a complex interaction of globalizing and localizing tendencies globalization a synthesis of local and universal values". Or it is being shaped by "cultural, social, and economic interconnectivities and interrelations and cross-border and cross-cultural mobilizations of power, language resources, and people".
Therefore, in the global contact zones, the what and the where are inextricably linked to each other. The importantly present within the nation-state engages not only with its own other Links Of London Charms which is discursively and ontologically marginalized, but also with the foreign other, which is often the importantly present outside the nation-state and in the global contact zones. As we focus on the where, and as we practice the art of recontextualization, we must learn to listen to the voices of the other within the Chinese nation-state, and to investigate how these voices challenge or even enrich the importantly present and how they together come to represent the making of the Chinese rhetorical tradition. Further, we must also learn to speak to the foreign other without essentializing it or negating its own rich and diverse tradition. The causal, rational mode of thinking of this foreign Other made its presence felt in China, first with the Jesuits in the late fifteenth century, then more recently at the turn of the twentieth century when the radical or iconoclastic turn to modern Western thought took hold in China, and now in the global contact zones.
Engaging the Other: Studying Chinese Rhetoric: in Global Contact Zones
By: endeavor19
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