Conceptual confusions and contradictions: A response to Professor Xiaoming Li

Abstract

Professor Xiaoming Li challenges the criticisms of contrastive rhetoric (CR) that draw on postcolonial theory by characterizing them as ‘‘imperialistic post-colonialism.’’ This oxymoronic term epitomizes the ambivalences, contradictions, and conceptual confusions that underlie her arguments. As Professor Li indicates, CR’s original conceptualization of culture has been critiqued for more than two decades. Drawing on postmodernist thought, the problem of cultural essentialism as related to asymmetrical relations of power has already been challenged not only by such critics of CR and applied linguistics as Dwight Atkinson, Adrian Holliday, B. Kumaravadivelu, and myself but also by such scholars in intercultural communication as Thomas Nakayama and Judith Martin. Despite this trend away from the simplistic understanding of cultural difference, Professor Li defends the research by Helen Fox, Robert Kaplan, and Vaidehi Ramanathan on writing in English as a second language (ESL), which appeared in the 1990s or earlier and supported cultural essentialism together with a colonial dichotomy between Self and Other. She entirely rejects the discursive construction of culture—a notion employed by influential postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said—and instead implies that all cultural products, practices, and perspectives exist objectively outside of discourse. Oddly, however, in attempting to mix Confucian and Aristotelian approaches in her writing, Professor Li is supporting the idea that culture is complex and hybrid, a conceptual core of the postcolonial theory that she vehemently attacks. Besides the question of how culture can be conceptualized, Professor Li and I disagree on the way in which we interpret the discourse used by the above-mentioned advocates of CR. In fact, this has to do with her main complaint about the criticisms of CR. In a previous article (Kubota & Lehner, 2005) in response to Connor (2005) and in other publications, I have already discussed in detail how liberal support for cultural sensitivity disguises itself as colonial benevolence while producing and legitimating a relation of domination and subordination. It is important to add that in contemporary liberal discourses such as new racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2014), explicit bigotry or intolerance toward the Other is eschewed and instead expressed in terms of benign cultural and linguistic differences. In other words, domination is rarely expressed in explicit language, such as: ‘‘They are inferior and we are superior.’’ This is why critical discourse analysis is useful to reveal underlying meanings in, for example, Kaplan’s seminal article that contains not only ‘‘cultural sensitivity’’ but also pejorative advice that ESL students should only imitate rather than create. Professor Li seems unwilling to acknowledge ideological meanings between the lines, and constructs Pennycook’s reading of Kaplan as misrepresentation using a bizarre comparison—a comparison between the ideological similarity of Kaplan and a 19th century British Orientalist school master and the ontological sameness of a chair and a table due to the identical number of legs, which, according to Professor Li, is a false reasoning.