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The critique of contrastive rhetoric makes me think of one of the lesson plans I use to introduce the genre of creative nonfiction to my GEL students. We discuss Kiese Laymon's "Da Art of Storytellin,'" and in the essay Laymon talks about the expectation put on him as a Black man throughout his education that he adopt a formal, academic voice. In class my students and I talk about what the implicit, coded meanings are behind a voice, which as Laymon describes it, crosses its legs and reads the New York Times. The implication is, of course, that there is no singularly English way of constructing a paragraph, because American culture has not been conceived of nor inflicted in a vacuum. Once, the eradication of native languages in favor of mandatory English was a tactic of subjugation in our country, and it's still In many contexts a tool of assimilation. Particularly in an academic context when our conception of writing "correctly" in English is a coded way of saying writing in a white or western conception of English.

Of course, contrastive rhetoric is useful when discussing how the conventions of rhetoric vary across national lines, as well as how they develop over time and through different historical lenses, but I think as writing instructors and instructors of literature, it's our obligation to make sure that in our comparative analyses of language across cultures, we're not also assigning a hierarchy of values to those comparisons, and we're continuing to couch our assumptions of standard English rhetorical structures in the power structures which created and sustained them.