Culture and Written discourse: Intercultural Rhetoric, multilingual writing

Summary: Kubota’s article from 1999 spoke about the false dichotomy between the west and the east that exists in the minds of many people in both the East and West. He refutes this mindset by giving counterexamples to standard perceptions of Japanese in community. According to his article, many, if not most, Japanese schools actually emphasis creativity, self-expression, and individuality.

I have always found the claim that Japanese schools promote communal and patriotic values while Schools in the US promote critical thinking and creativity to be ironic. I certainly don’t own the US public education system for promoting and garnering my ability to be creative and think critically because it did nothing of the sort. In fact, my experience with public schools is that they do the opposite. Classes promoting creativity (art, band, creative writing, etc) are typically the first classes to be cut if a school is short on funds. Classes teaching critical think usually consisted of memorizing everything the teacher said and regurgitating it on the test. Even literature and composition classes, which should garner both creativity and critical thinking, were reduced to standards. For instance, the five paragraph essay where every aspect of the essay has to line up with the “rules” of writing.

Personal educational experience aside, I agree with Kubota’s claim the “East” is represented in certain categories. Said referenced Flaubert as an example of Orientalism in the interview last class which I found interesting. I have read Flaubert’s memoirs and they do epitomize Orientalism. Every person from the near East or Africa is portrayed in a certain way. The ‘bad guys’ from the East, in the memoirs they are mostly from Egypt, are either savage brutes who live for violence or subtle con men who live for money. The ‘good guys,’ or tame savages, who help the Westerns are characterized as kindhearted but emotional, irrational, and dependent. The women, good or bad, as usually characterized as exotic and stupid, exotic and deceptive, fat and stupid, or fat and deceptive.

This brings to mind Kubota’s point about Orientalism being intentional in the political sphere. Although most cases of Orientalism in the education field can hardly be called malevolent, their are instances, especially in political rhetoric, that are premeditated. During the Iraq war, the US’s reason for staying was that the Iraqi’s were dependent on US soldiers for order and stability. Many of these same claims were used by the European empires of the 19th and early 20th centuries to justify continued presence in their colonies.

I thought Kubota’s critic of Rhetorical pluralism was well founded. It seems that much of what is called pluralism is only another name for indifference and another platform for Culturism. Teachers are aware of different “cultural cultural traditions,” but they stop there. When this happens, the quality of the ESL student’s rhetoric becomes irrelevant because it is explained by their culture. There isn’t a good or bad essay, but an essay written by a Chinese student, an Argentinian student, and an US student. The story of Jeremy and Jabu from last week correlates well with this point. Jabu’s academic successes and failures were explained away by her culture rather than her ability. As a result, any feedback was to help her acculturate rather than improve her craft. This can easily happen (and does though often to a lesson degree) in many educational settings with ESL students.