REVIEW. Writing from These Roots: Literacy in a Hmong-American Community. Duffy, John M. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007.

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1 REVIEW Writing from These Roots: Literacy in a Hmong-American Community. Duffy, John M. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, Tricia Serviss, Syracuse University John Duffy s Writing from These Roots follows the work of New Literacy Studies, which insists that the study of literacies be situated in practice. Writing from These Roots begins with the calls of Brian Street, Deborah Brandt, and others as they worry that New Literacy Studies may have contributed all it can. The concern is that literacy studies have become hyper focused upon the local and the present, attending to individual, isolated groups at the expense of engaging with the complicated, geocultural forces interacting with and upon them. Duffy studies the literacy practices of Hmong American immigrants relocated to Wisconsin following their exile from Laos after the Vietnam War. Duffy uses what Jacqueline Jones Royster calls historical ethnography, creating a complicated framework of material and ideological history within which to situate Hmong American conceptualizations of practices of literacy. Duffy s study pivots around a series of letters to the editor of a small Wisconsin town newspaper. The letters capture a public argument about the identity and, ultimately, the value of Hmong-American immigrants in the town. Reading through the exchange, Duffy describes the rhetorical strategies used by the Hmong-American writers and outlines two fundamental inquires of his book: How did this literacy practice Reflections 155

2 develop, and how might a reader come to contextualize these letters as literacy and rhetorical practices? In pursuit of this question Duffy historicizes literacy, both as it is conceptualized in the Western academy and by the Hmong people. Hmong history seems complicated by several things: hundreds of origin stories that contradict one another, cycles of colonialization and displacement that rewrite these stories in almost unknowable ways, and the interactions between the Hmong people with the US military and government during the Vietnam War that complicate these stories and their documentation even further. Duffy narrates the ways that the Hmong collective identity is embedded in their relationship to the idea of literacy itself. Loss emerges as the connective trope across Hmong stories loss of their books at the hands of Chinese imperialism, loss of their books to their own hunger, loss of their books to exile as they fled colonizers, and finally loss of a CIA contract that guaranteed them compensation for the loss of their people, property, and homeland through their involvement in the Vietnam War. Duffy depicts Hmong narratives about their literacy histories as implicit narration of their post-colonial identity, tracing the development of Hmong writing systems through the fourteen or more attempts by outsiders to design a writing system for Hmong people who, by the rise of the 20 th century, had lost their own system(s). Duffy, following works such as Walter Mignolo s Darker Side of the Renaissance, uses these documented attempts of colonization, via these many attempts to plant Western ideas of literacy among the Hmong, to emphasize the ways that literacy came to be valued by the Hmong as power itself power to conquer, power to define themselves, even messianic power to alter reality. Hmong thinking about literacy (and the loss of literacy) reveals, Duffy suggests, the ways that writing and writing systems carry ideological systems. Writing systems offer a conception of identity and position. Hmong alphabetic writing emerged from their local and transnational situation, a rhetorical response that, while it Reflections 156

3 ought to be viewed as a technological development, is more importantly a rhetorical development that conferred individual and social identity. The rhetorical conception of literacy that Duffy encourages is one he derives from Burkean schools of rhetorical thought, envisioning rhetoric as the use of symbols to shape perceptions of reality. A rhetorical conception of literacy, then, is one that acknowledges literacy as rhetorical and therefore ideological in that sense that, following James Berlin, all perceived realities result from pluralistic ideologies that themselves are enmeshed with rhetorics. From this point of view, literacy studies (particularly New Literacy Studies) ought to use a rhetorical conception of literacy to enact literacy studies itself. This sense of a rhetorical conception of literacies allows Duffy to argue that the lingering notion of preliterate societies is useless and antiquated. Preliteracy conceptually strips entire societies of their ongoing uses of symbols to shape collective realities and, in particular, obscures our appreciation of Hmong American literacies. Duffy suggests that we need to abandon deficit models and begin to investigate the material histories and rhetorics/literacies of peoples once dismissed as preliterate. Duffy devotes much of the text, then, to historicizing the Hmong s own sense of literacy by sketching out their self-reported political and economic history. Duffy focuses upon the 1960s era of CIA-sponsored schooling in Laos, meant to develop rhetorics of military literacy for Hmong soldiers working for the US. School literacy merged with preexistence missionary literacies, useful to the US government as, ultimately, training for Hmong soldiers. While Duffy observes these schooling campaigns as colonizing, he suggests that the genre of the defiant letter emerges as an unexpected counter-rhetoric in Laos schooling. These counter-rhetorics expand when the Hmong reach the US after the Vietnam War. Duffy notes that the rhetorics of literacy that shape and motivate Hmong American literacy practices are transnational and transglobal, operating across the boundaries of states, faiths, Reflections 157

4 and economies, and through the continuing upheavals of warfare, displacement, and exile. The study of Hmong American literacy practices, Duffy argues, complicates this idea in that to understand Hmong American literacies we have to understand the global, transnational, and profoundly historical negotiations from which they arise. And so the letters to the Wisconsin editors, exigency for Duffy s research, are reexamined through this geocultural perspective. Duffy distinguishes a series of rhetorics embedded in the letters: Hmong American rhetorics of testimony and new gender relationships; and regional rhetorics that emphasize their constructed place within the Fair City of Wisconsin in which they now live. Duffy traces the ways that Hmong American writers invent new genres for themselves in attempts to counter anti-immigrant rhetorics used by their neighbors; he argues that the Hmong Americans worked not only to persuade the public of their value and identity but also to build a public for themselves with which to engage. Duffy s work to understand Hmong American literacy practices, and the rhetorics embedded in and acting upon them, make two significant contributions to New Literacy Studies and Rhetoric and Composition. He contributes to Rhetoric and Composition by participating in the expansion of literacy studies to include considerations of transnationalism (as Beth Daniell and Peter Mortensen s 2007 anthology Women and Literacy begins to do). He also supports to the global turn in the field by enriching our glocational thinking (Susan Friedman s idea that the local and global are always complicit) and challenging literacy scholars to consider both local and global contexts. Most importantly, his work reestablishes associations already forged between literacy and rhetoric in work such as Deborah Brandt s Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts, emphasizing the new complications transnationalism brings to our ideas of situated practice. Writing from These Roots ultimately Reflections 158

5 contends that literacy development is personal, cultural, institutional, transnational, historical, and most significantly for the growth of New Literacy Studies, rhetorical. Works Cited Brandt, Deborah. Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts. Southern Illinois Press, Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Daniell, Beth and Peter Mortensen, Eds. Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century. Lawrence Erlbaum, Friedman, Susan Stanford. Locational Feminism: Gender, Cultural Geographies, and Geopolitical Literacy. Feminist Locations: Global/Local/ Theory/Practice in the 21 st Century. Edited by Marianne DeKoven. New Brunswick, NH: Rutgers University Press, 2001: Mignolo, Walter. Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Royster, Jaqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, Reflections 159