Building Empire Through Argumentation: Debating Salt And Iron In Western Han China

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Gloegalization has ushered new challenges into American rhetorical education. When people, information, culture, and capital cross national boundaries, how are we going to prepare students to deal with civic issues that are both? I local and global What do traditional goals of rhetorical education, such as citizenship and active civic life, mean in the context of globalization American rhetoric teachers have focused on educating citizens for the democratic ideal, and for the achievement of equality across ethnicities, genders, and classes within the United States. However, imposing the same educational ideals on an increasingly globalized but unequal world could easily be viewed as imperialistic, as in the cases of Americans teaching English in the Philippines and China in the early twentieth century. Such practices can only Juicy Couture remind people of the hypocritical discussions in the U.S. political and diplomatic arenas over the past eight years. The United States brutally forced democracy on the Iraqis and the Afghanis without engaging these people in a democratic process, without ...
... trying to understand their ways of deliberation.

Along with pedagogical and ideological challenges, globalization presents us with opportunities to reassess American rhetorical education, and to engage other traditions of rhetorical education and practices. In rhetorical studies, scholars have begun to examine the relationship between rhetorical education and imperialism, as in the studies of Cicero's and St. Augustine's discourses on Roman imperialism and the study of Zitkala Sa's writings on native Indians' education and American imperialism (Enoch). In composition studies, Bruce Horner and John Trimbur, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda have called our attention to Juicy Couture Watch the fact that for more than a century, U.S. college composition has been taught tacitly under the ideology of English monolingualism and the American nation-state. Suresh Canagarajah and I have addressed the ethical and pedagogical issues involved in the teaching of English writing in other multilingual nations (You, "Ideology"; Writing). Such scholarly efforts have allowed us to imagine new possibilities for rhetorical education in America.

To further rhetorical education against the backdrop of American imperialism, we must move beyond the boundaries of the nation-state; we must look elsewhere, and we must examine other rhetorical traditions. Because China is making a strong presence in the global political, economic, and cultural arenas, rhetorical transactions in those areas will only increase among citizens of both nations. An understanding of the Chinese deliberative practice becomes a must for American rhetorical educators. In this essay, I examine the Chinese argumentative tradition, a tradition that has grown from two thousand years of the Chinese empire but remains largely unknown to rhetoric scholars and teachers in the West. Specifically, I study a political debate in the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE-9 CE), an imperial state entangled in sociopolitical and cultural challenges not so dissimilar to those facing the United States today. By exploring argumentative practices and imperialism in a different tradition, we may better understand the challenges and possibilities in educating citizens of an increasingly globalized world.