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The Rhizome Revisited: Another Methodological Model for Global Liberal Studies
Global Texts/Global Contexts Conference, London, March 8th-10th, 2012
Afrodesia E. McCannon
We as a faculty are de facto part of NYU’s project to be a Global Network University.
Our presence at this conference certainly attests to this. I want, though, to suggest a refinement
or further investigation of the word global which, oddly enough (at least at the anecdotal level)
often troubles what we are as a program. What exactly does “global” mean and how might you
tackle the pedagogical issues teaching globally and granting a meaningful global degree? I am
going to suggest that the Global Network University is in fact not a global entity or at least not
yet. The reasons for this are representative of larger issues in globalizing curriculum across
academia and are also reflected in the challenges in my own curricular choices and strategies. In
short, NYU is not, is not yet, a global network university because a network, like a net, has lines
that cross. Currently, NYU-New York (which I have never heard it called) is the hub, is the
mothership to subsequent portal and subsidiary campuses, doorways to that central fixed order
we call the “Square.” NYU-Paris seems to have little connection with NYU-Buenos Aires and if
things continue in this vein, NYU-Shanghai will have little commerce with NYU-Tel Aviv. All
eyes are on the Square.
This weakness or lack in the network structure, as I suggested above, reflects some of the
issues I’ve encountered while attempting to evolve my course – which is currently really based
on the model of a World Literature course – into a Global literature course. By World Literature,
I mean a course that showcases the masterpieces and genius of cultures and/or peoples from
around the world, (just as the portal campus cities can be seen to showcase the specific cultures
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and nations in which they are located). I have wanted to develop my course further so that it is
not only global in scope (I look at the world areas of Southeast Asia, China, the Middle East,
Europe, North and West Africa) but also global in its methodological and pedagogical approach.
In trying to re-encounter the network aspect of a global perspective or project, I turned to the
work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
Their work, somewhat fashionable in the 1980s and 90s, expressed a model of interaction
using the botanical analogy of the rhizome. For those unfamiliar with the rhizome, it is a type of
underground stem structure (root) of a plant that Deleuze and Guattari juxtapose with the
underground stem structure of a tree. Unlike a tree (which they term arboresque), the rhizome, is
not dedicated to a centralized entity, but rather forms a complicated network of roots from which
plants spring. The above ground plants are not the be all and end all of the root system but rather
particularly dense nodes in the network (fig. 1).
(fig. 1)
Perhaps, the most familiar rhizome is the orchid. If you come across a patch of orchids,
what you are encountering is not a group of separate plants but a dense network, the flowers
being expressions of particularly fruitful and dense moments in that network. The same can be
said of grass; no one clump can be said to be the plant. A lawn is vast rhizomatic system (fig. 2).
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(fig. 2)
Moving out of the botanical and into the field of ideas, the rhizome is a useful means to
consider the world of global ideas, since one of the basic differences between Global and World
that is echoed in current scholarship is that the Global deals with a multitude of points and their
interrelation; for Deleuze and Guattari connections are obligatory: “…any point of a rhizome can
be connected to anything other, and must be (italics mine). This is very different from the tree or
root which plots a point, fixes an order” (Deleuze 7). The global rhizome invites us to release the
fixed point, be it the Square or the global masterpiece. Looking out at the field of orchids, there
is no center and no fixed order. It is a network that prioritizes contact and reaction. If this is the
model the global you want to embrace – and for me it is – how you do teach it?
Looking over recent discussion of how to conceive and teach globally, it is just this kind
of decentering and prioritizing of contact found in the rhizome that forms a motif in the
scholarship. In Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees – which is not explicitly about teaching
globally but about how to consider the complexity of culture by pulling back from the myopic
gaze at the masterpiece – he was drawn to an image in Alfred Kroeber’s Anthropology, the tree
of culture (fig. 3) which consists of intermingling branches unlike a real tree whose branches and
stems always diverge from each other:
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The course of development of human culture in history cannot be so described [as a real
tree], even metaphorically. There is a constant branching out, but the branches also grow
together again, wholly or partially, all the time. Culture diverges, but it syncretizes and
anastomoses too….The tree of culture…is a ramification of such coalescences,
assimilations, or acculturations. (Moretti 79)
(fig. 3)
The tree of culture, culture itself, is the fallout of different aspects of human existence
coming together and moving apart. The diagram of the tree of culture looks surprisingly like the
root of the orchid.
Moretti deals primarily with literature, but the chapter headings of Crossley’s
What is Global History? reflect the same impulses and strategies as the tree of culture in
defining what Global is or might be:
First is “Divergence,” or the narrative of things diversifying over time and space from a
single origin. Next is “Convergence,” or the narrative of different and widely spaced
things assuming similarities over time. Then comes “Contagion,” or the narrative of
things crossing boundaries and dramatically changing their dynamics at the same time.
Last is “Systems,” or the narrative of interacting structures change each other at the same
time. (9)
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For Crossley, these chapter headings of her book are both “analytical concepts and
narrative strategies”(9); the terms she uses, “convergence,” “divergence,” “contagion,” and
“system” are both the methods and the framing stories through which the global can be
expressed, and by analogy, taught. What is striking in her chapter titles is how they mirror
Kroeber’s tree of culture and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome as well. There seems to be a
general consensus on the strategies and underlying narratives of how we ought to approach
knowledge in the twenty-first century, via the de-centered investigation of multitudinous
elements.
This insistence focus on movement, interrelation, and contact as the basis of what inquiry
into the world means now, is not new, not to the academy and not to our faculty. What follows
are my attempts, though, to make this the pre-eminent concept, the overarching methodology of
my own course. The first example is simpler in its lines and I have found to be a successful
method of decentering while appreciating all the works of the representative cultures. The second
example is a hypothetical strategy that pushes further rhizomatic movement possible in a
classroom.
Example 1:
“Take a form, follow it from space to space” (Moretti 90)
One of the ways I have attempted to incorporate the idea of the rhizome into my class is by
literalizing Moretti’s suggestion to take a form and watch it move from place to place. I use the
frametale as a narrative form to trace as it moves across time and space. The frametale – a story
in which stories are told, but aslo one in which the framing narrative concerns a storytelling
event — is a useful form because it can be traced in a very teachable manner across the Cultural
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Foundations series. Further, frametales because of their elasticity are well suited for this kind of
travel. Framing narratives and the tales can be changed to suit a culture, a time, or an audience,
displaying an infinite adaptability. Even when the same tales appear in a different frame they
“effectively become different tales, in so far as purpose and sense change” (Irwin 393). This
chimeric effect that has great possibilities for student inquiry into the network of texts and how
they function when taken into a “foreign” space.
Though the frametale form has its roots in the oral tradition dating back three thousand
years, it has its first extant textual blooming in the third to fifth century A.D. in the Sanskrit
Panchatantra. The Panchantantra is the story of a king with three unintelligent for sons who is
worried about their ability to manage in the world. He enlists the help of a learned man to teach
them the ways of the world. The teacher, Vishnu Sharman, instructs the princes by telling stories,
mostly animal tales and fables. The text was translated into (among many other languages)
Persian and Arabic. In the ninth century the genre appears in the Near East most famously in the
Thousand and One Nights. 1 By the twelfth century the form is transmitted to Europe and finds it
height as a genre there in the fourteenth century with the Spanish Libro de buen amor (13301343), the Florentine Decameron (begun c.1350), and the Canterbury Tales (begun c.1386) in
which the contact with Boccaccio’s Decameron is evident. A lovely network can be established
even within the confines of these great, showcase, and nationalist works that allows them to be
released into the traffic of global artistic production.
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Jean Quarteat, in her lecture to the Liberal Studies faculty in the fall of 2010 suggested that such coincidences in
proximal cultures can be read as proof of “influence,” that is, if culture A has X and comes into contact with culture
B and then X, before unknown in culture B, appears then that is enough proof to assume there has been a
transmission between A and B. (Quarteat)
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Example 2:
“We are not talking about systems, economies, empires of the (whole) world, but about
systems, economies, empires that are a world” (Apter 45)
The rhizome is a thoroughly three dimensional concept in which any point could take you
anywhere and it need not confine itself to the genealogy of ancient and medieval texts. One
could consider a rhizomatic schema not solely for tracing through time the transforming of a
form but almost see it as a kind of contact improv of ideas, artifacts, and occurrences as they
move through time and space. So now, I would like to conjecture such a thought chain for use in
a classroom. This experiment takes advantage of two of the strengths of Liberal Studies, namely
its multi-/interdisciplinary nature and our access to NYU global sites, both of which would only
be beneficial in expanding the breadth of a more rhizomatic pedagogy.
A conjectural series of ideas that make a world:
Take for example the Mahabharata as point 1 in our rhizome. In the Sanskrit epic of the
rivalry and war between two branches of a family, we encounter the pantheon of Hindu gods. I
enjoy teaching my students about the stories of gods in this ancient text who weave in and out of
the story of the Padavas and Kurus. In a ploy to link the distant past to the present, I ask them to
consider what happened to the religion and the people who created the text two and a half
millennia ago. As it turns out, many of them arrived in New York City, so I have the students
look for and photograph traces of Hinduism in the city. Often students find images of Ganesh or
Krishna and Radha in Indian restaurant windows or walls. Let’s call the students photos of
Hinduism in the city point 2. However, New York is not the only city with Indian restaurants and
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London, of course, has a substantial Southeast Asian population. A recent novel, Brick Lane, by
Londoner Monica Ali is our next stop, point 3. In the novel, which reads like a Bangladeshi
Madame Bovary, the protagonist Nazneen – recently arrived from Bangladesh – and her husband
pass a curry or curry house (what Americans would call an Indian restaurant) on Brick Lane, a
street now famous for its “curries”:
She walked down Brick Lane to get to the tube station at Whitechapel. Days of the Raj
restaurant had a new statue in the window: Ganesh seated against a rising sun, his trunk
curling playfully on his breast. The Lancer already displayed Radha-Krishna; Popadum
went with Saraswati; and Sweet Lassi covered all the options with a black-tongued, evileyed Kali and a torpid soapstone Buddha. “Hindus?” said Nazneen when the trend first
started. “Here?” Chanu patted his stomach. “Not Hindus. Marketing. Biggest god of all.”
The white people liked to see the gods. “For authenticity,” said Chanu. (Ali 333)
Brick Lane is famous not only for its restaurants but as the main street of a major Bengladeshi
neighborhood the majority of whose inhabitants are Muslim. Brick Lane, the street, is point 4. In
her novel, Ali shows how Hinduism and the representation of Hindu gods in “Indian” restaurants
become the negotiating lynchpin and buffer between Southeast Asian Muslims and their
European clientele. The volley and play of orientalisms here would make this a fascinating point
on our rhizome to explore with students.
Brick Lane, the street, is so iconic and so emblematic in its own right that back in New
York, in Greenwich Village, just behind our offices, is the restaurant “Brick Lane” (a chain, no
less) that promises an “English-Indian” menu. 2 Let’s make the restaurant point 5 and imagine
2
“Located on a block of Sixth Street inundated with Indian cuisine, Brick Lane Curry House differentiates itself
from its neighbors with a bit more flash and an English-Indian menu. The bright purple fluorescent sign announcing
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the some of the discussion one could generate about the restaurant and its claims. Is anyone
running any of these curry houses Indian? What is the traffic between London and New York’s
Bengladeshi communities? Are those student photos of the Hindu gods in New York, deities that
the students first met in the Mahabharata, serving the same function in New York, that is as
marketing to New Yorkers charmed by the Hindu gods? To what extent are they then traces of
Hinduism and of what other world phenomenon might they be also be traces?
Brick Lane, the street, as the center of “Bangaltown” notably has bilingual street signs in
English and Bengali just as New York’s Chinatown does. The street signs are point 6. What does
that mean? What are the politics of getting bilingual street signs in an American or European
city? Was this the outcome of a municipal fight or part of the “authenticity” issue brought about
by internal tourism? Or a combination of the two? Or something else?
Curiously, On Brick Lane, within view of the curry houses, stand very close together two
bagel shops (beigel in British English). 3 Point 7. These huddle bakeries are reminders that Brick
Lane was once a Jewish neighborhood. There are subtle vestiges of this tucked here are there. In
fact, on the corner of the Brick Lane and Fournier Street sits the Brick Lane Great Mosque,
Jamm Masjid (formerly the London Great Mosque), point 8. However, this used to be a
synagogue when the neighborhood was Jewish, and before that a Huguenot chapel when the
neighborhood was populated with French protestants fleeing religious persecution. This explains
the French name of the street Fournier, Baker Street, – which, if time allowed – could take me
across town to the other Baker Street and the residence of Sherlock Holmes whose own relations
with the global nature of London one could take up…But I’ll stop there. Each one of these points
the restaurant's name contrasts with the coolly elegant interior, and the whole enterprise is modeled not after U.S.
Indian restaurants, but after the curry houses of Brick Lane in London, where curries have replaced crumpets as the
national meal.” (Brick Lane)
3
Apparently, this is the more authentic Yiddish spelling.
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could be much more deeply discussed and explored in class and outside of the classroom. They
could multiply to create fascinating worlds of interaction.
I hoped though to show and experiment with how literature, religion, art, food,
architecture, history, city planning, etc. can be brought into conversation with each other, by
taking seriously Deleuze and Guattari’s stipulation that “any point of a rhizome can be connected
to anything other, and must be” (7). Could this be done in the class while maintaining the
integrity of the curriculum based on great works. I don’t know. Crossley suggests, here speaking
of global history, that “The conundrum…is how to tell a story without a center. It is not certain
that this can be done.” (4) But there’s really only one way to find out. The focus on global
inquiry as one of divergence, contagion, syncretization, convergence, adaptations, systems, and
connections urges us to look at the world of ideas, acts, and artifacts as rhizomes and figure out a
way to infuse our curriculum with these strategies.
In my position as chair of Cultural Foundations Curriculum Committee, I have looked
closely at the curriculum and there is only one place where these fundamental concepts of the
global is prescribed. In the description of how to approach art we require “some attention to the
way images travel across cultures.” But there is no such dictate for literature, the bread and butter
of the course. To be fair, the preamble to the sequence asks all the questions that would lead to a
course focused on contact and reaction: “How did the interconnected global arts of the present
develop out of contacts between and among past traditions? To what extent is “art” itself a
concept that assumes certain cultural practices that may or may not be universal?....” However,
in that practical section of the curricular document that spells out what an instructor needs to
teach, there is a checklist of items to cover but no checklist for even the basic methodological
tenets spelled out in the preamble. I would argue that, however one choses to do so, a global
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methodology be given as prominent place as the materials are in order to provide, especially for
our new colleagues, not just what they need to teach, but how they might think about teaching
this material.
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Works Cited
Ali, Monica. Brick Lane. New York: Scribner, 2003. Kindle Edition.
Apter, Emily. “Literary World-Systems,” Teaching World Literature. Ed. David Damrosch. New
York: The Modern Language Association of America. 2009.
"Brick Lane Curry House." Feb. 29, 2012. http://www.bricklanecurryhouse.com/bricklane.
Crossley, Pamela Kyle. What is Global History? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans.
Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Quartaet, Jean. Global History in Practice: Lesson from Teaching and Scholarship. Cosponsored by
Social Foundations and Global Cultures Committees at Liberal Studies
Irwin, Bonnie. “Frame Tale East and West,” Teaching Oral Traditions. Ed. John Miles Foley.
New York: The Modern Language Association of America. 1998.
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. London; New
York: Verso, 2007.
Illustrations
Fig 1, “Fresh Rhizome of Cimicifunga Racemosa,” Lloyd, J. U. and C. G. Lloyd. Drugs and
Medicines of North America. Cincinnati, OH: Robert Clark, 184-5. Plate XXIII
Fig. 2, “Rhizome of Sedge (Carex)”, Weathers, John. Ed. Commerical Gardening. Grisham
Publishing, 1913. Figure 27.
Fig. 3, “Tree of Culture” Kroeber, Alfred. Anthropology: Culture Patterns and Processes. New
York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1923. Figure 23. Qtd in Moretti, Franco. Graphs,
Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. London; New York: Verso, 2007. 79.
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