Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries

The Rhetoric of Lines across America

Barbara Couture, Patti Wojahn, Barbara Couture, Patti Wojahn

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781607324034
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

With growing anxiety about American identity fueling debates about the nation's borders, ethnicities, and languages, Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries provides a timely and important rhetorical exploration of divisionary bounds that divide an Us from a Them. The concept of "border" calls for attention, and the authors in this collection respond by describing it, challenging it, confounding it, and, at times, erasing it.

Motivating us to see anew the many lines that unite, divide, and define us, the essays in this volume highlight how discourse at borders and boundaries can create or thwart conditions for establishing identity and admitting difference. Each chapter analyzes how public discourse at the site of physical or metaphorical borders presents or confounds these conditions and, consequently, effective participation—a key criterion for a modern democracy. The settings are various, encompassing vast public spaces such as cities and areas within them; the rhetorical spaces of history books, museum displays, activist events, and media outlets; and the intimate settings of community and classroom conversations.

Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries shows how rich communication can be when diverse cultures intersect and create new opportunities for human connection, even while different populations, cultures, age groups, and political parties adopt irreconcilable positions. It will be of interest to scholars in rhetoric and literacy studies and students in rhetorical analysis and public discourse.Contributors include Andrea Alden, Cori Brewster, Robert Brooke, Randolph Cauthen, Jennifer Clifton, Barbara Couture, Vanessa Cozza, Anita C. Hernández, Roberta J. Herter, Judy Holiday, Elenore Long, José A. Montelongo, Karen P. Peirce, Jonathan P. Rossing, Susan A. Schiller, Christopher Schroeder, Tricia C. Serviss, Mónica Torres, Kathryn Valentine, Victor Villanueva, and Patti Wojahn.

1
Democratic Discourse and Lines across America

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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.¹ 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 boundaries—be they national, community based, or self-selected. Our authors explore how these boundaries—crossed or drawn—have implications for rhetorical scholarship, language teaching, and valuing difference here in the United States. In the sections below, we introduce these works, framing them within the rhetorical context of democratic discourse. Admittedly, we are creating a very loose division here, for as the reader will see when delving into these essays, metaphorical, linguistic, and rhetorical boundaries and borders often are related to physical, geographical, and societal borders and boundaries. We leave it to the reader to tease out these relationships within the contexts of the situations each of the essays explores. At the end of this volume, we offer our reflection on the whole, along with some suggestions for future research and teaching practice.

We shall open our discussion of democratic discourse by calling out the terminological assumptions we are making in discussing democratic discourse in “America.” And we shall start with what popularly is assumed about democracy and about the United States—that it is a place where all can pursue the American Dream. What is that dream exactly? Perhaps the most simply put description appears in an apt popular reference: Wikipedia. The openly editable and free encyclopedia claims the “American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, a set of ideals in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward social mobility achieved through hard work” (Wikipedia 2014). The encyclopedia entry continues: “The idea of the American Dream is rooted in the United States Declaration of Independence which proclaims that ‘all men are created equal’ and that they are ‘endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights’ including ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’” In short, this dream assumes an environment in which all boundaries can be overcome in its quest since all have equal opportunity to pursue it. Underlying this dream of equal opportunity, we argue, is a staunch faith in democracy as the vehicle through which equal opportunity is protected. In the United States, where the American Dream is espoused, it is common knowledge that democracy is perceived as a good; in fact, the many attempts that the US government has made to spread democracy across the world—regardless of their success or failure—have been overtly justified as trying to do good. Philosophers and political scientists have taken a less biased stance toward democracy as an ultimate good, defining the accepted “objective” meaning of democracy, labeling criteria for achieving a true democracy, and also evaluating whether democracy once achieved is universally accepted as a flat-out good.

Let’s explore for a moment the values democracy as a good assumes, values that gird the ethos of the American Dream. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) offers a handy summary of “normative democratic theory” that addresses the reasons democracy might or might not be “morally desirable,” beginning first with a common definition of democracy and moving on to analyze the arguments made that this form of government is morally defensible (Christiano 2008, 2). Democracy, as defined in our SEP reference, “refers very generally to a method of group decision making characterized by a kind of equality among the participants at an essential stage of the collective decision making” (Christiano 2008, 2). The entry’s author talks about the viability of a system in which all participants are considered equal and up to the task of decision making and also discusses whether there is essential merit in collective decision making in the first place—an important point affecting individuals’ decisions to participate and their effectiveness in doing so. In short, the author aims to describe what democracy is and how we know it when we see it rather than to demonstrate its essential merit or value as a moral good.

If we were to poll the authors whose essays we present in our volume about the value of democracy and its signature of collective decision making, we would likely hear them answer resoundingly that yes, collective decision making that values all voices is a moral good. In fact, several of our authors raise concerns about what they identify as communities and circumstances in which boundaries or limits have been put on how decisions or actions are collectively determined.

Collectively, this volume and its authors argue that when the discourses of some are ignored due to slighting others, intentionally or not, communities do not function to preserve or to honor the ability of all to participate in group decision making, nor do they protect the freedom of all to participate. Nonetheless, freedom is a touted American value, a very cornerstone, if you will, of the American Dream. Going back to the SEP entry on democracy, its author supports the essential nature of this value, noting that, for many, freedom or liberty is the foundation of democracy: “Democracy [say some] extends the idea that each ought to be master of his or her life to the domain of collective decision making” (Christiano 2008, 6).

In the United States, when citizens pledge allegiance to our nation, they promise to preserve “liberty and justice for all.” This pledge does not acknowledge that there is a problematic connection between freedom and collective decision making, a point elaborated in the SEP entry. On the one hand, if all are free to participate, the quality of collective decision making is at risk, not only because of the possibility of irresolvable dissension but also because not all can be equally qualified to make decisions that will best serve the whole (see Christiano 2008, 5). On the other hand, if all are not allowed to participate in democratic deliberation, then individual freedom to participate is curtailed. Yet holding this position is questionable as well because to assure freedom for each individual “each person must freely choose the outcomes that bind him or her,” and if they do not so freely choose, “then those who oppose the decision are not self-governing” and, therefore, not “free.” In short, “they live in an environment imposed by others” (Christiano 2008, 7). Given this essential contradiction inherent in the very idea of a democracy, what good does discussion do to preserve individual freedom when it aids deliberation leading to a collective decision? We will come back to this dilemma when we discuss the second term within our definition of democratic discourse. For the present, let’s assume for discussion’s sake that for democracy to function effectively, it must honor both individual freedom and collective decision making, and let’s take up briefly what is required to preserve a democracy that works this way.

Scholars have identified a few environmental criteria requisite for democracy to function. In his wonderfully compact treatise On Democracy, Robert A. Dahl, for example, presents an excellent list of criteria that must be in place for democracy to be sustained: “effective participation,” “voting equality,” “enlightened understanding,” “control of the agenda,” and “inclusion of adults” (Dahl 2000, 37–38). Three of these criteria are especially pertinent to our focus on democratic discourse. The first of these is “effective participation,” which, Dahl says, requires that “all . . . members must have equal and effective opportunities for making their views known to the other members as to what the policy should be” (37). Clearly, in a discourse exchange, if some are kept from participating, the discourse cannot be democratic. The second is “enlightened understanding,” or the opportunity for all participants to have “equal and effective opportunities for learning about the relevant alternative policies and their likely consequences” (37). We will come back to this one, which has resonance for academics: beneath “enlightened understanding” is the scientific approach to knowledge seeking presumed to be the foundation of democracy, that is, reasoning from facts—the legacy of the Age of Enlightenment. And, finally, for democracy to be preserved, individuals must have opportunity to take “control of the agenda,” that is, must be given ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1 Democratic Discourse and Lines across America
• Part I: Imagining Boundaries: Rhetoric Resisting/Defining Symbolic Borders
• Part II: Living Borders: Rhetoric Confronting/ Erasing Physical Boundaries
• About the Authors
• Index