Living in Rhetorical Diaspora

I must admit, when I first finished watching Up the Yangtze, I couldn’t figure out how we were going to connect it to the theorists we’ve been reading in class. I could see some of the terms we’d discussed in action, but I was confused as to how the film was going to deepen our discussion. After Tuesday’s class, however, I was struck by the juxtapositions we discussed, and I realized that some our discussion of those terms in class over the past couple of weeks may have been a little flattening when it comes to those terms. Diaspora, for example, refers to people who are living outside of their traditional homeland. But is that all it entails? Is there any other definition, other than the geographical one? I would argue that there is. In Up the Yangtze, we see—several times—evidence of a rhetorical diaspora. That is, a group of people separated not from their traditional homeland, but from their traditional rhetoric.

Cindy and Jerry came from two very different families. Cindy’s family was poor and illiterate, and Jerry’s family was well off, although maybe not rich. Cindy was forced to work on the boat because her parents could not afford to send her to high school, and needed her help making enough money to survive. Jerry chose to work on the boat because he wanted to make money. This boat was designed to cater to tourists, taking them on expeditions along the river, while Jerry and Cindy worked hard to feed and serve them. Here, we see evidence not of geographical diaspora, as Jerry and Cindy were still living in China, but of rhetorical diaspora, as each of them left the confines of their home and the company of their families in order to interact with those from different cultures who had come to explore their home country. They stepped outside the rhetoric of “common” Chinese people and into the rhetoric of tourism, and of other countries, such as France, Germany, Canada, and the United States.

We see the same kind of rhetorical “adjustment” in Ann George’s “Mr. Burke, Meet Hellen Keller.” According to George, Burke’s theory is that to be a successful rhetor, you must speak your audience’s language. You can only persuade someons “insofar as you talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (George 342). Jerry and Cindy had to do this in several ways while working on the ship. First, they had to learn to communicate with people from their own country who grew up differently from them. They had to learn the common “language” of all of the Chinese employees on the boat—not just words, but gestures, facial expressions, etiquette. Second, they had to learn to communicate with the tourists who came from different countries. Jerry and Cindy both knew English, but again, this communication required more than just words, especially with people from countries other than the States.

George also says that Burke and Keller use “new sight” or “perspective by incongruity,” meaning that they use translation (in this case, adapting to the audience’s language) to achieve defamiliarization. In other words, they use their audience’s language or symbol systems to bring attention to the incongruities between their experiences (George 433). Again, we see this in Up the Yangtze in several different ways in the examples of Jerry and Cindy, who must adapt both to each other and to the culture created on the boat. We also see this in the example of the Chinese tour guide who showed a bus full of tourists around the relocatees’ apartments and claimed “they’re all happy!” when a tourist suggested that the relocatees who wouldn’t get to live there would not be happy. He adapted the language of the tourists (English) in order to communicate with them, but in doing so brought attention to the reality of the situation in China—these relocatees were losing their homes, and he was defending their happiness to happy tourists from developed countries. It is in this way that a rhetorical, rather than geographical, diaspora was created in the film (and in China).

-Jessica Gonzalez