The Global Turn and the Question of “Speaking

From”
Bo Wang

I n the past decade, rhetoric and composition scholars have called for “glo-
balizing” the discipline to meet the challenges of globalization (Hesford;
Hesford and Schell; Royster and Kirsch). A substantial body of work has
been produced in the intersecting fields of rhetoric and composition to reset
scholarly visions and priorities from a globalized, transnational perspective.
Scholars have used global and transnational studies to challenge the exist-
ing theoretical assumptions and redraw the parameters of analysis in femi-
nist rhetoric, comparative rhetoric, human rights rhetoric, composition, and
other areas (Baca; Dingo; Dingo, Riedner and Wingard; Lyon; Wang). These
works have not only integrated global and transnational studies into the disci-
pline’s critical operations but also articulated some larger goals for the future.
The transnational literacy practices, transnational feminist pedagogies,
and other critical frameworks developed thus far have surely enabled us to see
how the circulation and exchange of texts and artifacts in transnational spaces
can alter our assumptions about rhetorical argument, audience, and situation.
They have helped us consider how we can connect localized, individual stories
to global networks so as to expose, rearticulate, and transform global power
relations. Yet it seems to me that turning to the global entails a reflection on
the question of “speaking from” (Mignolo). We may have to ask ourselves a
new set of questions: What does it mean to “globalize” our discipline? How
do we develop a globalized view of rhetoric and composition? In whose terms,
and in the name of what kinds of knowledge or intellectual authority, are such
scholarly practices performed? From which epistemic space and location are
we speaking?
In my own work, I search the historical archives of early twentieth-century
Chinese intellectuals’ translations of euroamerican feminist discourse for in-
sight and inspiration. My research shows that Chinese intellectuals translated
a large number of euroamerican philosophical, literary, and historical texts on
women’s rights, putting the translated texts in conversation with their own
cultural heritage and lived experience. For instance, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, among
numerous euroamerican texts, were translated into Chinese and recontextual-
ized by the Chinese debates on women’s rights. Meanwhile, Confucian notions
of humanity, self-cultivation, and womanhood were brought in dialogue with
euroamerican concepts of human rights, individualism, and feminism. This
translational work, or what I call “transrhetorical practice,” exemplifies the

Composition Studies 44.1 (2016): 134–137

dialectical processes by which concepts, theory, and discourse are translated,
recontextualized and reconceived as they move across cultural, geopolitical
borders.
I see transrhetorical practice as both a metatheoretical framework and
inventional heuristic. More specifically, transrhetorical practice describes the
meaning-making process of cross-cultural translation that takes place in the
interstices of two or more different worlds caught in asymmetric power rela-
tions. This dialectical process brings self and other together and subjects both
to transformation in close linguistic and cultural encounters. What this means
for our scholarly practices is that a globalized rhetorical perspective must bring
the language and symbolic practices of the other into an open-ended dialogue
with euroamerican practices and allow plural local terms to frame and reframe
one another across shifting cultural and historical contexts. In such dialogic
exchanges, euroamerican practices will no longer be used as the norm to gener-
ate broad conceptual categories and universalizing theories; instead, both the
universal and the particular are to be historicized to reveal the limitations of
each term in its historical interconnectedness with other terms.
Transrhetorical practice is inevitably metonymic. As Maria Tymoczko
notes in a different context, “the metonymies of translation are a key to the
construction of the representations that translations project—whether they are
representations of history, culture, values, or literary form” (57). That is, when
concepts pass from one language to another, they must always be differently
constructed through a new set of connections and contexts. This notion of
translation accentuates the strategic choices the colonized made to establish
authority by responding to the political, social, aesthetic, and ideological
context of the receiving culture and giving voice to the native experience. For
rhetoric and composition scholars, this means an awareness of the representa-
tional function of our work in the many worlds we traverse; it also implies a
focus on the negotiation and exchange through which new rhetorical concepts,
genres, and strategies are brought into being across languages, cultures, times
and locations.
Transrhetorical practice is a spatial-temporal concept. It involves the
creation and transmission of knowledge through time across different spatial-
temporal spheres and cultural sites. Its horizon is historical; it situates the
multiple interpretations and utterances of certain concepts generalized from
particular times and spaces within their own geohistorical locations. Through
recontextualization, transrhetorical practice links cultural specificities of
language practices in a local environment with larger geopolitical forces and
networks. As my own research has shown, drawing on classical and vernacular
Chinese as well as euroamerican languages, early twentieth-century Chinese
intellectuals experimented with neologisms to rearticulate what “women’s
The Global Turn 135
rights” might mean to them. Their translations of such concepts constitute a
new locus of enunciating “feminism” in transnational spaces. Thus, transrhe-
torical practice is a way of border thinking that may lead to new meanings
and new ways of naming.
As we continue to “globalize” our discipline, enacting transrhetorical
practice means that we need to think about the question of “speaking from”
and consider local, native discourses and interventions as coeval contributions
to global and transnational studies of rhetoric and composition. Recovering
marginalized work by rhetors and writers outside of the metropolitan centers
and identifying specific terms and concepts in their work to develop new
interpretive frameworks—examples of transrhetorical practice—may help us
expand our analytical vocabulary and include the other in the domain of a
cross-cultural dialogue. The point of departure in such a dialogue, in my view,
is no longer necessarily always anchored in euroamerican terms and concepts
with which we are familiar and comfortable. We may as well experiment with
plural local terms and use what we have learned from other cultures to engage
with critical issues of mutual concern. Then we might be able to converse with
rather than speak down to the other. We might be able to model for students
the kind of reflexive, dialectical meaning-making process of reading and writing
in transnational spaces. As such, transrhetorical practice might offer one way of
imagining a globalized discipline of rhetoric and composition in our own time.

Works Cited
Baca, Damián. Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing. New
York: Palgrave, 2008. Print.
Dingo, Rebecca. Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public
Policy Writing. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2012. Print.
Dingo, Rebecca, Rachel Riedner, and Jennifer Wingard, eds. Transnational Femi-
nisms. Spec. issue of JAC 33.3-4 (2013): 517-669. Print.
Hesford, Wendy S. “Global Turns and Cautions in Rhetoric and Composition Stud-
ies.” PMLA 121.3 (2006): 787-801. Print.
Hesford, Wendy S., and Eileen E. Schell, eds. Transnational Feminist Rhetorics. Spec.
issue of College English 70.5 (2008): 461-528. Print.
Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll’s House. Trans. Nicholas Rudall. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999.
Print.
Lyon, Arabella. Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric, and Rights. University Park:
The Penn State UP, 2013. Print.
Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges,
and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Gesa E. Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Ho-
rizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Carbondale: SIUP, 2012.
Print.

136 Composition Studies

Tymoczko, Maria. Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in Eng-
lish Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome, 1999. Print.
Wang, Bo. “Comparative Rhetoric, Postcolonial Studies, and Transnational Femi-
nisms: A Geopolitical Approach.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43.3 (2013): 226-42.
Print.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. New York: Penguin
Books, 1982. Print.

The Global Turn 137

of American by Paper: How Documents Matter in Immigrant Literacy from the
University of Minnesota Press.

Bo Wang is associate professor of English and Co-Director of the Writing

Program at California State University, Fresno. Her research is focused on
how transnational and feminist perspectives on rhetoric can be theorized to
reconfigure research methods of rhetoric and composition. She has published
in Advances in the History of Rhetoric, CCC, College English, Rhetoric Review,
and Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

Xiqiao Wang is a fixed-term assistant professor in the Department of Writing,

Rhetoric and American Culture at Michigan State University. Her research
attends to multilingual students’ literacy practices in transnational contexts
and to writing pedagogical practices that can support literacy learning.

Kat Williams is an MFA candidate in creative writing (nonfiction) at the Uni-

versity of Wyoming, where she also teaches first-year composition. Her cre-
ative work deals with queer theory, gender identity, and disorders of all kinds.

Morris Young is director of English 100, professor of English, and faculty

affiliate in Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. 
Building on his previous work, Minor Re/Visions and Representations: Doing
Asian American Rhetoric (with LuMing Mao), his current project conceptual-
izes Asian American rhetorical space.

Amy Zenger is an associate professor of English at the American University

of Beirut, where she teaches rhetoric and composition. Her recent publica-
tions include New Media Literacies and Participatory Popular Culture Across
Borders, coedited with Bronwyn Williams, and two chapters coauthored with
Joan Mullin and Carol Haviland.

Contributors 197
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