ABSTRACT
This chapter articulates a comparative cultural rhetorics approach to the study of indigenous rhetorics in the Americas. I inflect Steve Mailloux’s concept of “comparative cultural rhetoric” toward a methodology for examining rhetorics across cultures, drawing from scholarship on the ethics of comparison and from decolonial scholarship on cultural rhetorics. This approach aims to unite what have been considered divergent perspectives on non-Western rhetorics to emphasize shared practices of critique. Though rhetoric, especially in George Kennedy’s Comparative Rhetoric , as in some classical texts, such as Quintilian, has been conceived of as natural, the idea that rhetoric is natural and thus general deserves further critique. On the one hand, the notion of rhetoric’s naturalness seems to invite comparison across cultures, while, on the other hand, that invitation to a general concept of rhetoric does not do enough to dismantle hierarchies within the valuation of different cultural rhetorics. After a partial summary of recent works on indigenous rhetoric, I suggest that a comparative cultural rhetorics approach points to the need for further interdisciplinary study. Finally, I challenge the notion that rhetoric tends to flourish in democratic contexts, suggesting that, from a decolonial perspective, it is the moment of encounter from which we begin to see the critique of rhetorical imperialism in myriad rhetorical practices of resistance.
