Welcome to the "Beyond Greco-Roman Rhetorics" community. Please join us in adding to, revising, and updating this wiki.

Description

This wiki is to provide a handlist of rhetorical terms beyond the dominant Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition. It includes rhetorical terms and concepts and biographical information from rhetorics and rhetoricians of the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Pacific as well as other marginalized communities, traditions, and histories in "the West," such as Jewish rhetorics, Muslim rhetorics, Irish rhetorics, women's rhetorics, GLBT/Queer rhetorics, disability rhetorics, and poor/working-class rhetorics. It is our hope that this wiki can become an important resource for students, scholars, teachers, and others interested in rhetoric outside of dominant European traditions and histories. This wiki is meant to be an ongoing, collaborative project.

Background

Beyond Greco-Roman Rhetorics is a constant work in progress. It was started in during the Spring Semester 2009 by students in Qwo-Li Driskill's History of Rhetoric (English 353) course at Texas A&M University. The purpose of the wiki is to provide information to students and scholars (both within and outside of academia) about rhetorical histories and concepts outside of dominant Greco-Roman and Eurocentric models. This work is informed by the theory and work of numerous scholars currently engaged in decentering Greco-Roman rhetorics in rhetoric studies and rhetoric and composition. The title of this wiki is based on Victor Villanueva's 1999 call to "break precedent" from Eurocentric discourse ("On the Rhetoric and Precedent of Racism," College Composition and Communication. 50.4 (1999): 645-661) as well Carol S. Lipson's and Roberta A. Binkley's Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks.




Poma, Guaman. Drawing of a quipu and quipucamayoc. Drawing 143.
From Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. 1615.

Adding and Revising Entries

Expectations and Conduct

All members of this wiki are invited to add, develop, and revise all parts of this site. All members are expected to engage one another respectfully.

Language

The language used in this wiki should be accessible to a wide audience, including those outside of academia. Please avoid overly academic jargon. Entries do not have to be written in Formal Academic English. Participants are invited to add entries in any language they wish, including languages often marginalized in academic discourse such as African American Language, Hawai'ian Pidgin, and Spanglish. Speakers of other languages besides English are encouraged to help create translations of entries, including the main navigational and style pages.

Cultural Awareness

Not all information may be appropriate for this wiki. In many Indigenous communities throughout the world--for instance--certain songs, stories, and images are not to be used outside of their local and/or familial contexts or without following particular cultural protocols. Even if certain songs, stories, and images are available online or in texts, they may not have been obtained in ethically and culturally responsible ways. Keep this in mind when deciding what to include. When engaging rhetorics from traditionally marginalized communities, one must also be mindful on using reliable sources that are, themselves, culturally aware and critically engaged with systems of power.

Organization and Style Guide

Currently, the wiki is mainly organized regionally and culturally. As the wiki grows, it is likely that additional organizational categories will be needed based on additional factors, such as historical period or types of rhetoric (visual, material, performed, etc). Please follow the style guide in order for us to have uniform fonts, headings, and subheadings. The style and formatting of the entire wiki may be changed by this wiki community if, through discussion, a different style is agreed upon.

Topics

While the wiki was started to create a handlist of rhetorical terms and concepts, additional entries are being created for biographical information. As the wiki grows, it is likely that additional categories will be added to include significant historical events as well as summaries and descriptions of materials/texts. Members of this wiki are invited to create additional categories as needed. Entries on contemporary rhetorics outside of the dominant rhetorical canon are welcome. While the focus of this wiki should remain outside of Eurocentric models, there are some European rhetorics that are included here because they have been marginalized in the dominant rhetorical canon, such as women's rhetorics, GLBTQ rhetorics, disability rhetorics, poor/working-class rhetorics, and non-Christian rhetorics. In addition, some regions of Europe are often overlooked in rhetorical studies, such as Ireland and Iberia. Further, Medieval rhetorics are only marginally included in most rhetorical histories. It makes sense, then, to include some content from European traditions, as long as that content is often ignored or overlooked in rhetorical studies, is not readily available in other texts used within rhetoric studies, and does not shift the focus of this wiki onto Eurocentric rhetorics.

Embedding Images, Video, and PDFs

This wetpaint website makes it possible to embed videos and images and include attachments with your entries. Users are encouraged to use these features, as long as they are correctly cited and credited. Many scholars are more than happy to have their essays from scholarly journals available in additional locations, but please obtain permission from the author before uploading their essays.

Rhetorical Timeline

While timelines can be problematic, in that they perpetuate the idea of a linear progression of history, they can also be useful in order to have a clearer picture of historical contexts. The rhetorical timeline here is meant to put rhetorical histories within global and local contexts. While the focus remains on rhetorics and histories outside of dominant European histories, important moments from those histories are also included in order to revise our understandings of the contexts of those histories. Within Eurocentric education, few of us are taught--for example--that Shakespeare was born after the figure of La Virgen de Guadalupe appeared to Juan Deigo (Cuautlaohuac) in Mexico, or that formal Chinese rhetorical training was taking place long before Isocrates opened a school for rhetoric in Athens. The timeline is meant to put these histories into a larger perspective. Wiki members are also to encouraged to create additional visual rhetorics to convey this information that do not use a linear framework.

Definition of Rhetoric

Within the dominant Greco-Roman tradition, rhetoric is generally thought of as the art of persuasion. However, even within classical Greco-Roman traditions, rhetoricians did not agree with each other about what rhetoric was or what it included. This wiki takes a more expansive definition of rhetoric that includes all kinds of communication and meaning-making and takes the stance that rhetorics are always culturally situated and locally defined. Rather than use Greco-Roman models for rhetorics outside of the Greco-Roman tradition, users are encouraged to address rhetorical traditions, concepts, and histories from within their particular cultural contexts.

Works Cited

All citations should be in standard MLA format. Works Cited information should appear in each entry as well as the Works Cited page. When this wiki was originally developed and included only a few entries, it was user-friendly to just have a single Works Cited page. It's evident as the wiki grows, however, that it is more user-friendly to include Works Cited in each entry. Please do both: the Works Cited at the end of each entry provides quick information for the readers, and the main Works Cited page is a valuable resource for students and scholars wanting an in-depth bibliography of rhetorics beyond the Greco-Roman canon. Please don't use Wikipedia or other wikis and standard encyclopedias for your source material. Not only does the information on wikis change, this resource should provide information not easily accessible on other wikis. Further, standard encyclopedias are not the strongest source material for scholarship.

Works Cited

Lipson, Carol S. and Roberta A. Binkley, eds. Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks. Albany: State University of New York, 2004. Print.

Poma, Guaman. Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. "The Guaman Poma Website." Det Kongelige Bibliotek. 5 May 2009. <http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/en/frontpage.htm>. Web.

Villanueva, Victor. "On the Rhetorics and Precedents of Racism." College Composition and Communication. 50.4. June, 1999: 645-661. Print.