Damián Baca is associate professor of Mexican American studies at the University of Arizona. He is author of Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing and coeditor of Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2012 CE, Rhetorics of Difference, and Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise, winner of the 2020 Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award.
Decolonial projects can end up reinforcing dominant modes of thinking by shoehorning understandings of Indigenous and non-Western traditions within Eurocentric frameworks. The pluralization of literacies and the creation of so-called alternative rhetorics accepts that there is a totalizing reality of rhetoric and literacy. This volume seeks to decenter these theories and to engage Indigenous contexts on their own terms, starting with the very tools of representation. Language itself can disrupt normative structures and create pluriversal possibilities. The volume editors and contributors argue for epistemic change at the level of the language and media that people use to represent meaning. The range of topics covered includes American Indian and Indigenous representations, literacies, and rhetorics; critical revisionist historiography and comparative rhetorics; delinking colonial literacies of cartographic power and modernity; “northern” and “southern” hemispheric relations; and theorizations of/from oceanic border spaces.