A traditional approach to contrastive rhetoric has emphasized cultural difference in rhetorical patterns among various languages. Despite its laudable pedagogical intentions to raise teachers' and students' cultural and rhetorical awareness in second language writing, traditional contrastive rhetoric has perpetuated static binaries between English…

Cultural difference is an important topic of discussion in second language education. Yet cultural difference is often conceptualized as fixed, objective, and apolitical based on an essentialist and normative understanding of culture. This article challenges such conceptualizations by examining and politicizing multiple and conflicting meanings of…