Duffy: "Letters from the Fair City: A Rhetorical Conception"

Amazon has yet to deliver the book we were to have read for this post; however, I improvised and blogged about Duffy:

     In this article, John Duffy explores the different rhetorics that were learned, interpreted and utilized by immigrants of the Wisconsin town, Wausau. The Hmong people of Southeast Asia began immigrating to this town in the 1970s and most were political refugees due to their assistance of CIA efforts in Vietnam. After being assimilated in the town for a decade or so, their population began to increase and non-immigrants of the town (US Citizens) began publicizing their opinions in a local newspaper that the Hmong people were exploiting welfare and other government assistance programs. It was also a large issue that a lot of the Hmong people didn't speak English and the townspeople thought they should learn: “Our American society . . . can no longer support a segment of the population that is under-educated, unskilled and ultimately nonproductive.” was common sentiment help by the townspeople. Articles like this and with similar themes surfaced in the 1980s and 90s in the Wausau Daily Herlad.

     Duffy, intrigued by the resistance the immigrants were receiving, conducted dozens of interviews with the people in order to understand how they learned to read and write. It was through the opinion letters that a certain level of literacy was achieved by the Hmong's. What started as a denunciation of the whole people for exploiting government systems and “promoting” criminal behavior gave the Hmong people a chance to defend themselves: “This rhetoric, however,did not silence Hmong residents of the city but spurred a literate response as some Hmong writers took up the themes and forms of the rhetoric to present alternative conceptions of themselves and their place in the city” (232). By engaging with the anti-Hmong rhetoric, it gave the people a chance to develop their own rhetoric and create a “civic identity” (Sandra Stotsky). The opportunity to have their voice heard and use constructs of the English language also helped the Hmong people gain a certain level of legitimacy and, somewhat, subvert the rhetoric that was speaking against them. This development of literacy among the Hmong people is Duffy's key notion of “the rhetorics of literacy.”Duffy believes that the dynamic rhetoric and literacy shared can be used to dissect and learn about the dissemination of literacy by use if rhetoric.