Genre Networks and Empire: Rhetoric in Early Imperial China - Softcover

Xiaoye You is Liberal Arts Professor of English and Asian Studies at Penn State University and formerly Yunshan Chair Professor at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. He has published extensively in comparative rhetoric, multilingual writing, and world Englishes and is the author of Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy and Writing in the Devil’s Tongue: A History of English Composition in China, both published by Southern Illinois University Press.

INTRODUCTION

This book explores the decolonial option in studies of non-Western rhetoric. The decolonial option seeks to expose how the colonial and imperial matrix of power operated in the past and continues to operate in a series of interconnected structural modes; further, it works to liberate people from the mirage of modernity and the trap of coloniality by building a foundation of local knowledges and meaning-making practices (García and Baca; Mignolo; Ruiz and Sánchez). While these goals have been most visibly articulated by Indigenous and Latinx intellectuals and activists (Mignolo and Walsh; Tuck and Yang), they resonate with comparative rhetoricians, who study non-Western rhetoric. Aligned with decolonial scholarship, comparative rhetoricians have long argued that non-Western rhetoric needs to be examined on its own terms rather on those of the Greek-Roman tradition, wary of any attempt to build a universal theory of rhetoric. They also warn that emic studies of a non-Western rhetoric are inadequate. Rather, rhetorical practices need to be studied dialogically in conjunction with other traditions and ongoing sociopolitical concerns serving as frames of reference (Hum and Lyon; Mao “Beyond Bias”), moving towards what Walter Mignolo calls “border epistemology”.

The paths to the border epistemology hold both challenges and promises. Some of the challenges are already manifest in the opening paragraph. The use of terms “West” and “non-West” risks reinforcing colonial binaries such as the “civilized” West versus the “barbaric” Rest and reifying the dominance of the Western rhetorical tradition. The use of the term “rhetoric” easily evokes speech-making and civic education in ancient Greece and Rome. The use of English, one of the Euro-American imperial languages, for scholarly writing has exacerbated the difficulty of decolonization. Nevertheless, border epistemology offers promise, including humanizing non-Western peoples, centering “other” ontologies and epistemologies, and ultimately building a more inclusive foundation of meaning-making, feeling, and living.

In efforts to decenter Western epistemology, however, there exists a tendency to usher non-Western concepts and practices into rhetorical studies without fully attending to the oppressive social structures from which these concepts and practices emerged. This book argues that in studies of a non-Western rhetoric, the decolonial option must include an exposition and critique of the imperial, colonial, ethnic/racial, and sometimes feudal, matrix of power residing in that tradition. This move can benefit comparative rhetoric in a number of ways. First, it reminds us that people in non-Western contexts have suffered and continue to suffer injustices not only caused by colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, but also by feudal, gender, ethnic/racial, and linguistic hierarchies of local origins. As cited in the epigraph, for instance, Mao Zedong pointed out in 1948 the entanglement of domestic and foreign forms of oppression amidst China’s struggle for decolonization. Second, this move serves to foreground the problematics of a dualistic thinking frequently found in comparative rhetoric, i.e., viewing the non-West as an exterior to the West. In doing so, it helps us recognize resistance and oppositionality as “rhetorical traps of a coloniality and modernity/rationality grid". Third, this move encourages scholars to further interrogate how rhetoric has enabled the West to sustain an imperial matrix of power from the past (the Greek and Roman empires) to the present (North-Atlantic nations).   

In making the decolonial move, this book examines rhetoric in early imperial China, a period rendered invisible by Western biases, and does so by centering Chinese theories of genre. Specifically, this book focuses on how an imperial matrix of power was established through what ancient Chinese called “wenti jingwei” (????), or genre networks. Owing to liberal democratic ideologies, the field of rhetorical studies has paid much attention to rhetorical theories and practices in pre-imperial China, especially during the Warring States period (475 BCE—221 BCE), when hundreds of schools of thought vied for political power. This book argues for the importance of moving away from this period and into the imperial era for its affordance of understanding rhetoric and other ways of government such as autocracy. To explore rhetoric and autocracy, this book argues that Chinese networked theories of genre are the key as distributed use of genres was instrumental for imperial government. While networked approaches to genre studies have been employed in the West to study scientific and organizational communications (Bazerman; Spinuzzi), this book will demonstrate that the ancient Chinese developed such approaches for understanding textual relations and imperial government and for writing history.    

Central to the ways that genre networks regulated the activity of the imperial government was through a range of texts and codes. The technology of writing was underscored by court historians. After the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, united the Middle Kingdom in 221 BCE, as recorded by historian Sima Qian, he tightened control over his subjects by regulating their use of writing. He did this in a number of key ways: by imposing a script with standard orthography (seal calligraphy), burying literati alive, and burning books from the hundred intellectual schools. In addition to these violent measures, he strengthened empire-wide communication by imposing a unified legal code and bureaucratic procedures and a uniform system of weights and measures, systematizing the axles of wheels and the widths of state roads, and formalizing bureaucratic genres. Serving as the nerve system, the codes, procedures, roads and genres connected the central government and its distant bureaus. While the Qin dynasty (221 – 207 BCE) was short-lived, only lasting fifteen years, it laid a foundation for its successor, i.e., the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), to develop a sophisticated semiotic system to manage ethnic diversity and geopolitical complexities.

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