The Rhetoric Tour 2008! WooHoo!

At left: The New Rhetoric always makes more sense after a couple of bottles of Rogue beer.

At the end of May I embarked on a three-stop Rhetoric tour... a good time was had by all.
FIRST STOP: University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. May 17 – 20, 2008
The Promise of Reason: an international conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric.
We conference attendees stood out, identifiable by our name tags bearing the somewhat ominous words “The Promise of Reason [name and institution]” and by the free canvas totes we all carried, which also bore the words "The Promise of Reason." What if, I worried, we just couldn't deliver on this "promise"?

I gave a talk called "Counterpublic Cinema: Public Reasoning in the Space of a Film Festival." It was about the Queer Women of Color Film Festival in San Francisco. People asked me questions and I answered them. I felt smart.

SECOND STOP: The Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Seattle WA.
May 23 - 26, 2008

Notes about RSA: Ed Schiappa, who led my research workshop, is an upstanding guy. He often affirms you by responding, "Groovy." We didn't agree about the concept of public spheres - well, I felt I didn't have enough time to fully articulate how I'm using the concept, and he kept saying "THE" public sphere is a ghost in the machine...wish I had more time with this man.

Morris Young and LuMing Mao and several contributors put together a panel to promote our upcoming anthology, "Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric" (forthcoming Utah State Press).

Jen Sano, UH alum and soon-to-be PhD student at Michigan State, was my roommate. We skipped out on the last day of the conference to go to the Sasquatch music fest in Eastern Washington, at a gorgeous outdoor venue called the Gorge. Rogue Wave and Stephen Malkmus were my fave performers. I ran out of money and Jen shared her chicken strips and fries with me. We bought $11 cups of Budweiser.

THIRD STOP: AP English Language and Composition Exam Reading
Daytona Beach FL. June 10 - 17
Left: Me with Liza Erpelo and Sarah Gambito in Daytona Beach. Pinays represent!

Sarah, a poet from NYC who teaches at Baruch college, summed up the situation with one question: "Did you ever think when you were taking this test that one day you'd be grading it?"
And what a coincidence, the birthdays of the kids taking the test landed in 1991, the year when Liza and I took our AP English exams!
Actually I had a pretty good time, grinding out grades for about eight hours, then frolicking in the Daytona sun and surf. Home of NASCAR, spring break hijinks, and beer bongs sold in the local Walgreens. This may sound a bit much, but I felt at times amongst my people - ENGLISH TEACHERS. We're a diverse bunch, that's for sure, but how many people derive pleasure from sharing with others the little-known name for the backward "P" that marks a paragraph (it's called an alinea, btw)? My table leader, Jane, a private high school teacher from upper East side NYC who's been reading AP and SAT for 20 years, scribbled this tidbit on a post-it and I kept it as my bookmark for my trip novel, Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

I read many essays arguing whether or not we should keep the penny as currency. The kids are alright.

Emelihter Kihleng, Pohnpeian Poet

Right: Emeli festooned with lei during her reading at the Center for Hawaiian Studies, April 2008. Melanie Ried thinks Emeli is all that and then some.

My Urohs (Kahuaomanoa Press 2008) is the new book of poetry from Emeli Kihleng, a UH alumn. In fact, I remember some of these poems in their nascent stages during Robert Sullivan's workshop back in 2005. Emeli has since gone on to teach in Micronesia as a Micronesian English teacher amongst faculty comprised mostly of foreigners. In her no holds-barred style, Emeli describes this experience in "No Post in Colonialism in COM (College of Micronesia)":

they say:

it's a trait they don't have here
they are not thorough
they can't copy a sentence
they don't eat green stuff (vegetables)
because they say it's pig food
it's pitiful, it's hopeless they say
they can hire some yokel dokel dong to do it
(on teaching developmental English courses)

it's different in the real world, they like to say


Another favorite poem of mine is "Destiny Fulfilled?" about sending a care package to her childhood friend who is stationed in Iraq, a pointed critique of Pacific Islanders recruited into the U.S. military, as this excerpt conveys:

the smiley thug soldiers keep recruiting
on Saipan, Majuro and Palau
brown islanders signing away their freedom
on islands seized by "liberation"
60 years before

I ponder these statistics as
she sends me email forwards
about "friends vs. best friends"
postcards that read
"On Patrol: Operation Iraqi Freedom"

As Albert Wendt writes in the back cover blurb: "[H]er voice is a new fusion of English and Pohnpeian, the result of her upbringing and life in Pohnpei, Guam, Hawai’i, and the USA."
Right on, Emeli - hope I can still visit you on Guam and maybe Micronesia one day.
For more info on My Urohs visit Kahuaomanoa Press at http://kahuaomanoa.googlepages.com

Ngugi wa Thiong’o at UH Manoa

"Monolingualism is not a good thing for the world." Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Above: Ngugi and Noe Noe Silva in the English Dept. UH Manoa, April 2008


This past spring semester was a blur of writing and teaching, but a few particularly inspiring moments come to mind. One was Ngugi's visit to UH Manoa as the Inouye Lecturer, sponsored by the American Studies department. Generous as he is, he also gave lectures in various departments, including a visit to the English Department as part of a panel with Political Science PhD candidate and fellow Kenyan Sam Opondo, Dr. Shankar from English, and Dr. Noe Noe Silva, also from Political Science.

Ngugi reminded us that Decolonising the Mind (1986) is "intimately tied to the Pacific," recounting the story of how a visit to Aotearoa (New Zealand) and discussions with Maori he had met inspired him to write the book for which he is most well-known. Speakers on this panel addressed how relevant Decolonising is to studies of politics and language, and in their own work, more than 20 years later.

Ngugi responds: "Recovery of languages is part of saving the world."

Beforehand, I had joked with Cheryl that we need to send Ngugi to the Philippines as the solution to all of our woes. Oddly enough, Ngugi then brought up the Philippines as an example to support his point about colonized memory: "Wherever Europe went, they planted their memory." The starting memory of the Philippines? King Philip. The effect of being named after its conquerer is the message "I belong to Philip" - and this is the beginning of memory for the Malay inhabitants of this archipelago in the China sea that happened to be in the path of the Spanish. If the Spanish colonialists planted memory on bodies and minds through language, then, Ngugi explains, "decolonising the mind is resurrection of another memory" - the buried memory of place and minds.

Who am I?

A return to the previous state of being, Ngugi asserts, has the effect of "securing a base [of identity? of power?] in order to effectively engage, in order to give and take" in the world.
A country that survives by supplying cheap labor to the rest of the world has no traction. It's all give, no take.

Fuck. No joke.