Edited by Hui Wu and Tarez Samra Graban
Foreword by Patricia Bizzell

Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition
Edited by Thomas Rickert and Jennifer Bay

Information and Pricing
978-1-64317-316-0 (paperback, $59.99); 978-1-64317-335-1 (hardcover, $119.99); 978-1-64317-317-7 (PDF, $49.99); 978-1-64317-318-4 (EPUB, $49.99; available 15 April 2023). © 2023 by Parlor Press, with glossaries, notes, bibliographies, and indexes. 606 pages, 7.5 x 9.25" trim with duplex cover.

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Reviews

Scott R. Stroud (2023) "Global Rhetorical Traditions," Quarterly Journal of Speech, DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2023.2230728

About Global Rhetorical Traditions

GLOBAL RHETORICAL TRADITIONS is unique in design and scope. It presents, as accessibly as possible, translated primary sources on global rhetorical instruction and practices of Asia, Africa, the Near East, the Middle East, Polynesia, and precolonial Europe. Each chapter represents a different rhetorical region and includes a prefatory introduction, critical commentary, translated primary sources, a glossary of rhetorical terms, and a comprehensive bibliography. The general introduction helps contextualize the project, justify its organization and coverage, and draw attention to the various features, characteristics, and/or philosophies of the rhetorics included in the book. The book’s significance lies in its contributions to both studying and teaching global rhetorical traditions by offering representative research methods and primary sources in a single volume. It can be read as scholarship, as reference, and as textbook.

Brief Contents

Foreword by Patricia Bizzell
"Introduction: Renewing Comparative Methodologies" by Tarez Samra Graban

1. Arabic and Islamic Rhetorics: Early Islamic, Medieval Islamic, Arabic-Islamic
2. Chinese Rhetorics; Spring-Autumn and Warring States Period (Classical), Han Dynasty, Six Dynasties (Early Medieval), Tang Dynasty, Song Dynasty, and Ming Dynasty, The Modern Period (20th Century)
3. East African Rhetorics: Nilotic
4. Indian and Nepali Rhetorics: Indian-Poetic, Indian-Logical, Hindu
5. Indonesian Rhetorics: Post-National
6. Irish Rhetorics: Medieval Irish-Gaelic (Non-European)
7. Mediterranean Rhetorics: Byzantine, Hebraic Mediterranean
8. Polynesian-Hawaiian Rhetorics: Post-Colonial Hawaiian (Non-European)
9. Russian Rhetorics: Kievan Rus’
10. Turkish Rhetorics: Middle Turkish (Central Asia)

Contributors
Index of Glossary Terms
Index of Names, Peoples, Places, and Religions
About the Editors

Contributors

Raed Alsawaier, Leonora Anyango, Maha Baddar, Shuv Raj Rana Bhat, Gregory Coles, Trey Conner, Rasha Diab, Richard Doyle, Robert Eddy, Lahcen Ezzaher, Tarez Samra Graban, Shreelina Ghosh, Elif Guler, ku‘ualoha  ho‘omanawanui, Steven B. Katz, Andrew Kirkpatrick, Uma Krishnan, Haixia Lan, Keith Lloyd, Anne Melfi, Georganne Nordstrom, Lana Oweidat, Maria Prikhodko, Ellen Quandahl, Jim Ridolfo, Brian J. Stone, Jeffrey Walker, and Hui Wu.

What People Are Saying

"Global Rhetorical Traditions brings the world—and especially the world of rhetorics—closer together. Twenty-eight contributors offer ten alphabetically arranged chapters, presented as rhetorical regions, ranging from Arabic to Turkish rhetorics. Each chapter offers a helpful prefatory introduction, translated primary sources, a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary of terms. A global antistrophos or counterpart to Bizzell, Herzberg, and Reames ’s The Rhetorical Tradition, this meticulously edited volume expands not only the spectrum of transnational and comparative rhetorics but also the methodologies required for analyses. A stellar contribution to our scholarship, GRT will become a foundational source for study and a well-charted map guiding future research." —Richard Leo Enos, Emeritus Piper Professor (State of Texas), Quondam Holder of the Lillian Radford Chair of Rhetoric and Composition, Texas Christian University

"When a reviewer sees a manuscript like this, she should think, 'Why hasn’t anyone done this before?' That was exactly my response to Global Rhetorical Traditions: Why hasn’t anyone put together a comprehensive collection of global rhetorical contributions? Hui Wu and Tarez Samra Graban make clear that they are whom we’ve been waiting for. Only smart and experienced editors/authors like Wu and Graban could have pulled off a project like this one, one that smacks you upside the side of the head to remind you about just how much great stuff you do not know. Theirs is a terrific, generative milestone in rhetorical histories and theories."—Cheryl Glenn, Distinguished University Professor of English and Women's Studies, Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, and co-founder of Penn State's Center for Democratic Deliberation.

"Wide-ranging in scope, innovative in methodology, and significant in its contribution, Global Rhetorical Traditions teaches us what it means to engage with global rhetorical traditions in the twenty-first century. Not only does it introduce us to rhetorical traditions that have hitherto been underrepresented or understudied but it also anchors itself on translated primary resources and on discovering and developing local terms of engagement specific to the cultures that have engendered these practices and traditions across time and space. Thanks to editors Wu and Graban, as well as the rest of the anthology contributors, our understanding of global and local, useful and non-useful, western and nonwestern, ancient and modern will not be the same anymore, nor will be the epistemologies that inform and shape these sticky binaries." —LuMing Mao, Professor and Chair of the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies and Asian Center Faculty Affiliate at the University of Utah

“Over the past decades, several volumes bear the title of ‘Global’ to highlight the universality of Eurocentric knowledge production, even when studying non-European languages. Global Rhetorical Traditions is undoubtedly different and groundbreaking because it translates key texts extracted from several non-European rhetorical cultures. These translations effectively challenge the long-established hegemony of the Greco-Roman teachings and rhetorical traditions. This innovative approach generates an excellent start for a more comprehensive methodology that adequately illuminates the different ‘rhetorical’ traditions of each non-European culture. Experts and readers with basic knowledge of 'rhetorical' studies will benefit from the volume. The translated texts will appeal to a large audience among scholars of comparative rhetoric, comparative literature, comparative poetics and world literature.”—Hany Rashwan, Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at UAE University and Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Birmingham

“This innovative volume pulls out for closer scrutiny pieces from several regions of the world that defy and disrupt habitual viewpoints of the landscape of excellence and quality in rhetorical performance as a quintessentially human enterprise.  With the use of translations of exemplary texts and robust analyses and interpretations, this volume re-casts our sense of origin and impact in rhetorical arenas over time.  The desired effect is to move us more deliberately not only toward a more globalized vision of the rhetorical enterprise but also toward the use of an enriched set of methodologies for what it means in the 21st century to do meaningful comparative work as we fashion paradigms for engagement in rhetorical studies that are broadly and powerfully rendered.”—Jacqueline Jones Royster, Professor Emerita, Georgia Institute of Technology and The Ohio State University

"Top scholars Hui Wu and Tarez Samra Graban have encountered and arranged a group of key texts in the histories of rhetoric. Global Rhetorical Traditions is the first anthology of its kind, a selection of essays, glossaries, complex prefaces, and extensive footnotes that are useful and important for scholars as well as for graduate and undergraduate students in rhetoric and writing studies, communication studies, medieval studies, and other areas as well.  The book includes central texts from the rhetorics, languages, and cultures of  Arabic and Islamic Rhetorics; Chinese Rhetorics; East African Rhetorics; Indian and Nepalese Rhetorics; Indonesian Rhetorics; Irish Rhetorics; Mediterranean Rhetorics; Polynesian-Hawaiian Rhetorics; Russian  Rhetorics;  and Turkish Rhetorics. Very accomplished and notable scholars have written the chapters, which contain the apparatus necessary for further study and that persuade the reader on every page of the centrality of the larger enterprise.  Crucially, the editors and the authors are adept in international languages. The book is one of the most important anthologies of the last two generations and is a must-read for scholars and teachers of rhetoric.  The volume is trustworthy,  carefully crafted, and, simply, phenomenal. I recommend it highly." —Kathleen Ethel Welch, Presidential Professor of English and the founding Director of the Institute for Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology at the University of Oklahoma.

Hui Wu and Tarez Samra Graban dutifully and brilliantly add to the effort to bust the now flaccid but relentless mythos that Western rhetorics and the Greco-Roman traditions are the end-all and be-all in rhetorical, communication, and writing studies. Bringing together a diverse range of sub-editors who expertly explain and analyze rhetorics and traditions from Africa, India, Russia, Polynesia, Turkey, and more,  this is just the book my graduate students in rhetoric have been looking for and one my undergrads, in the multi-identity, multi-cultural context in which I teach will simply love. I know, cuz I do. —Vershawn Ashanti Young, editor of Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Longue Duree of Black Voices, Professor, Department of Communication Arts and Department of English Language and Literature, University of Waterloo

About the Editors

Tarez Samra Graban is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University, where she teaches global rhetorics at the graduate level, teaches with transnational and comparative methodologies at the undergraduate level, and studies the rhetorical practices and archival positioning of women academics, activists, and elected leaders in southern Africa and the Middle East. Graban has published in African Journal of Rhetoric, Gender & Language, Rhetorica, College English, and College Composition and Communication. Her books include Gen Admin: Theorizing WPA Identities in the 21st Century (with Colin Charlton et al., Parlor Press, 2011), Women’s Irony (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), and Teaching through the Archives (edited with Wendy Hayden, Southern Illinois University Press, 2022). With Anne Melfi and Nicole Khoury, she edited “An Annotated Bibliography of Global and Non-Western Rhetorics” (2021). From 2015 to 2018 she held a faculty research fellowship at the University of South Africa.

Hui Wu is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Literature and Languages at the University of Texas at Tyler. An accomplished scholar recognized for comparative studies of rhetoric, global feminist rhetorics, and history of composition in a transnational context, Wu has published her studies in scholarly anthologies and selective journals in rhetoric and composition, such as College English, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, College Composition and Communication, and Rhetoric Review. One of her articles, “Lost and Found in Transnation: Modern Conceptualization of Chinese Rhetoric” won the 2010 Theresa Enos award for the best article in Rhetoric Review. Her books include Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Literary Women (Lexington Books, 2010), Reading and Writing about the Disciplines: A Rhetorical Approach (with Emily Standridge, Fountainhead Press, 2015), and Guiguzi, China’s First Treatise on Rhetoric: A Translation and Commentary (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016).