Democratic Discourse and Lines across America

BARBARA COUTURE AND PATTI WOJAHN

Those of us who graduated from American high schools or colleges and were introduced to the "classic" exemplars of literature that define the American experience will have read or seen Thornton Wilder's (2003)Our Town — the bittersweet life story of an American girl in a small town that is her whole world, though the world she dreams she is in is so much larger. And, if you have seen or read the play, you cannot fail to remember the strangely addressed letter Rebecca tells her brother George about: a minister had sent a letter to Rebecca's friend, Jane Crofut, and Rebecca tells George, "It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America." George, in turns, says, "What's funny about that?" And Rebecca goes on, "But listen, it's not finished: the United States of America, Continent of North America, Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God — that's what it said on the envelope." "What do you know!" replies George (Wilder 2003, 46).

What do you know, indeed! The expansiveness of this address and its endpoint in a single unity presumed to contain everything that came before it could not fail to capture our imagination. To consider that our personal experience is circumscribed somehow in the mind of God, with several other earthly entities defining one's place in that mind along the way, is both liberating and binding. After telling George about this strange address, Rebecca quips, "And the postman brought it just the same" (Wilder 2003, 46). Despite enormous possibilities for loss and limitation carried across enormous distances, one person manages to connect with another across villages, counties, countries, continents and so on by way of the postman.

Our Town touches us because of its power to display both the joy and the tragedy associated with our attempts to connect to one another and make life meaningful for ourselves by defining a place where we belong. That struggle is bound by the way we locate and describe ourselves and by how others locate, describe, and choose to communicate with us. And it is this phenomenon of connecting and communicating across borders as experienced in the United States that our volume Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries attempts to explore. In the United States, citizens all share the title American, but not all who live within its boundaries and are subject to its laws are perceived to be equally worthy of that title.

In presenting this diverse set of essays exploring the ways groups of Americans experience "American-ness" in our country as they try to communicate with others about their lives and needs, we explore both the power and perversity of framing identity by places — real or imagined — that are defined by borders and boundaries. And we are reminded, too, that in our very presentation of these essays, we are drawing borders and boundaries around their meaning as well. In particular, we are staking a claim about the function of lines across America — real or imagined — in the sphere of another bordered universe: democratic discourse. To defend — as far as we can in a brief introduction — this leveling of sorts, we offer here some reasons it is important to think about democratic discourse in America and reasons lines, borders, and boundaries are important elements that dictate or diffuse the success of democratic discourse among those who choose to pursue it.

A few caveats before we begin: our purpose in introducing the topic of borders and boundaries in America from a rhetorical perspective is not to assume or defend a particular political or juridical perspective on borders and boundaries, nor to assume a definitive stance on what comprises America or American-ness. Rather, it is to offer a perspective drawn from themes that define our expectations for rhetorical interaction as identified by theorists (including ourselves) and from general expectations about American-ness that underlie perceptions of this quality as a popular ethos in the United States — an ethos that presents some challenges for creating a fair space for public discourse in our democratic society.

In short, our objective is to inspire thinking about elements of interaction that contribute to or exacerbate fair exchange in a variety of rhetorical situations here in the United States. In presenting this illustrative sample of discourse situations that inspire thinking about borders and boundaries, we have loosely arranged our collection into two sections. We consider in part 1, "Imagining Boundaries," what we perceive as more figurative border divisions. Here our authors theorize about specific categories of difference that have consequence for how individuals interact when striving to learn in the classroom, understand key issues in a national context, or get their needs met in local communities — categories defined by language, academic context, or definition. In part 2, "Living Borders," our contributors examine more specifically the communication experiences of individuals confronting physical...