Many of the points McDougall and Nordstrom bring up reminded
me of Winnemucca. A lack of American understanding of the Hawaiin culture
allowed the the queen and Trask to use their cultural tools to say one thing to
the American people and another to their own people. For example, “Previous works analyzing the
queen’s mele (Silva, Aloha; Nordstrom)
have note that the queen frequently employed kaona using Hawaiian words with
multiple meanings so as to present fewer political meanings to readers with
limited knowledge of the Hawaiian language, primarily non-Native speakers”
(105).
Another piece that stuck out to me was when McDougall and
Nordstrom say of the queen, “She was very aware of how she had been portrayed
in the American media—from a laughable savage caricature to an exotic,
sensual temptress—and worked to counter these images through language and
experience that embodied Western values” (106). Again, this is much like
Winnemucca’s use of the individual, which went against her culture, to relay her
message to her American audience.
I also found it interesting when McDougall and Nordstrom
bring up, “Moreover, desperate times call for desperate measures, and the queen
may have used the only tools available to her, kaona and a shared cultural
memory, to deliver her memory” (110). This has me curious about other times
when this may be the case. On the surface, the queen is using tools, like
denouncing Hawaiian traditions and “adhering” to Christianity in order to
underhandedly influence American’s, but I still wonder what the reaction of her
fellow Hawaiians actually was.
Concerning Trask, one thing I found to be important was,
“Like the queen’s approach, one of the ways Trask establishes her ethos as a
leader is by sharing her mo’okū ‘auhau, at once adhering to traditional
Hawaiian protocol and asserting rhetorical sovereignty by setting the
parameters of how her ethos should be judged” (111). Determining how a writer’s
ethos should be judged is an interesting idea because controlling that means
paying attention to things that seem to often be overlooked. Writers all
establish ethos, but it’s always open to the reader’s interpretation. Establishing
ethos in a manner that actually sets the “parameters of how her ethos should be
judged,” is pretty impressive.
Overall, I was the most interested by both the queen and
Trask’s ability to use rhetorical tools that basically went over the heads of
Americans. For example, “In contrast, settler and tourist audiences, though
able to detect themes of resistance, can be counted on to miss the arguments
for resistance Trask transmits via kaona” (113). This is by no means something
new, but the queen and Trask’s use of the cultural elements, which Americans
were trying to get rid of, as rhetorically effective tools, is fairly genius.
When broaching multiple cultures, establishing and defining your ethos is a major task (that's probably why you see politicians insist that we are all Americans). When a rhetor has to established multiple audiences that will interact with words and present their ethos in a varied of ways to count as credible to different audiences, they have to do so covertly. I would imagine, any discovery by the "main" audience of a second or third audience would lead to censorship. And here in lies the problem. Queen Kapi'olani, for instance, is using her perceived "main" audience (white people) to disseminate her words across Hawai'i to her real main audience. In this case, white people are the vehicle in which to send the message. The irony and awesomeness are off the charts. I believe we can find examples of this technique used by Native Americans today. Basically, these cultures understand that imperialistic empires rarely, if ever, acknowledge or attempt to understand the cultures they are colonizing. This blind ignorance (or prideful arrogance) leaves areas of rhetorical sovereignty to exist.
ReplyDeleteI've also been interested in examples where culture can be played off as a rhetorical move, as in this piece and in Winnemucca's work. I really like the quote used in McDougall and Nordstrom's piece on page 105 to describe this idea: "[the colonized must] 'denounce through artistic expression and sometimes hide their denunciation with artistic expression.'" By taking a close look at examples like Winnemucca and the Hawai'ian queen, we can see the effectiveness of these strategies. However, for them to work, I think the suppressor has to make certain mistakes, most importantly being not understanding the suppressed's culture, either due to misunderstanding or a lack of trying. An example of this is on page 100, where the authors state that "works are often problematically categorized as 'Hawaiian' and not 'of Hawai'i'." There are misunderstandings because of a larger inability to understand aspects of a culture, which results in amassing people of Hawaii into one category--Hawaiian--as opposed to understanding the difference between the indigenous and the immigrants. This happens with Native Americans as well, as we have seen with tribal identity and reservations.
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