Who Cares If Rhetoricians Landed on the Moon? Or, a Plea for Reviving the Politics of Historiography

Abstract

Historiography Ryan Skinnell[H]istories of our tradition are rhetorical acts, the products of the historian's own cultural milieu.Narratives . . . of our tradition are governed by the historian's commitment to a system of beliefs nourished in the present. However "faithful" it may presume to be to historical events, an account of the past inevitably endorses a specific set of valuations, defends a particular set of social, political and economic relations, and advocates a specific direction for contemporary society (175). Takis This tropological "broadening imperative" is closely linked to historiographical theories of "revisionary history," which James Berlin, an early proponent, defined as "the search for the excluded other…exploring the margins, examining the supplement-the excluded and silenced-and giving it voice" ("Octalog" 35). If history is conventionally written by victors,Berlin entreats historians to attend to the vanquished ("History" 146). Revisionary history cuts across disciplines and incorporates complex, and sometimes competing, goals. But at its core, revisionary history focuses on broadening the field's vision by searching for people, movements, or methods excluded from canonical histories. By broadening the field's vision of what can be considered "rhetorical," revisionary historians have made significant interventions in the history of rhetoric. They have participated in, and often spearheaded, the re(dis)covery of non-male, non-white, non-Western, non-normative, non-privileged, and more recently, non-human, historical actors. 3 Small historical steps and giant disciplinary leaps notwithstanding, however, this essay is not a catalogue of revisionary successes. In fact, "rhetoricians on the moon" is a generative symbol because it comprises conflicting notions of (space) exploration. On one hand, the inexhaustible supply of research subjects suggested by unreachable horizons is exciting; on Who Cares if Rhetoricians Landed on the Moon? 3 the other hand, "broadening" threatens to become the grounds on which revisionary historiography exists rather than a tropological appeal for developing perspective(s).The latter is the argument I intend to make-as a result of rhetorical studies' changing political and intellectual conditions over the past three decades, "broadening" is no longer necessarily connected to the search for critical perspectives around which it developed. ByronHawk makes a similar point when he claims that, "revisionary history has given way to bureaucratic mandate (retrieve the excluded)" (110). Apropos Hawk, I contend that the majority of contemporary revisionary histories are not "revisionary" in Berlin's critical sense of the term because historians connect the broadening imperative to the disciplinary project of developing a more "complete" historical picture. Consequently, contemporary revisionary histories are often pitched toward reinforcing the field's beliefs instead of critically examining them. Revisionary historiography has therefore come to serve preservative, regula...

Recanonizing Rhetoric: The SecretinandofDiscourse

“…Skeptical of the revisionist project, Graff and Leff downplay the need for critical approaches, claiming that "revisionist complaints are not always well-considered and the older scholarship is hardly as monolithic or stultifying as it is sometimes represented" (2005,12). In contrast, Ryan Skinnell (2015) is skeptical of historical revisionism for an opposing reason: recent revisionist histories are not sufficiently critical because they have "come to serve preservative, regulatory functions" (113). Both too critical and not critical enough, revisionist historiography retells the past with a purpose: to unsettle (or, in some cases, reinforce) rhetoric's long-standing meaning by revisiting its ancient past(s).…”