Eavesdropping as Rhetorical Tactic: History, Whiteness, and Rhetoric.

Abstract

At cocktail party at the CCCC convention in 1997,1 overheard male voice say, guess it's hip to be white guy again, huh? I immediately wondered, did whiteness become hip topic at cocktail parties? And does he think it's hip to be white 'gal' too? After returning home, I continued to wonder about what his words implied. How does history function so as to make such comments possible? What exactly does it mean to be a white guy? And how do history and whiteness (and the history of whiteness) inform rhetoric and composition studies? This comment, the fortuitous moment of overhearing it, and my subsequent questions have haunted me ever since, ultimately compelling me to write this article, which proposes eavesdropping as rhetorical tactic and then employs it to investigate intersections of history, whiteness, and rhetoric. In the United States, scholarly discussions of history and rhetoric have rarely included whiteness as principal object of analysis. Instead, when rhetoric was first recovered for composition studies, rhetorical theories were presented as ahistorical structures that could be lifted from, say, fourth-century BCE Greece and dropped into, say, twentieth-century U.S. politics in an effort to persuade, say, Southern Democrats to vote for Richard Nixon (circa 1968) and George W. (circa 2000). The idea was that rhetorical theories are timeless; the applications, time-bound. This idea has been challenged by scholars, such as James Berlin, who have argued that rhetorical theories are not timeless but are always grounded in the sites of their origins (115). This idea has also been challenged by scholars?again, such as James Berlin?who have argued that rhetorical

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