Composition, Literacy, and Culture

Resounding the Rhetorical offers an original critical and theoretical examination of composition as a quasi-object. As composition flourishes in multiple media (digital, sonic, visual, etc.) Byron Hawk seeks to connect new materialism with current composition scholarship and critical theory.

The period of apartheid was a perilous time in South Africa’s history. This book examines the tactics of resistance developed by those working for the Weekly Mail and New Nation, two opposition newspapers published in South Africa in the mid- and late-1980s.

Tasteful Domesticity demonstrates how women marginalized by gender, race, ethnicity, and class used the cookbook as a rhetorical space in which to conduct public discussions of taste and domesticity.

Winner of the 2019 CCCC Outstanding Book Award.

Lorimer Leonard shows how multilingual migrant women both succeed and struggle in their writing contexts. Based on a qualitative study of everyday multilingual writers in the United States, she shows how migrants’ literacies are revalued because they move with writers among their different languages and around the world. The book details the complicated reality of multilingual literacy, which is lived at the nexus of prejudice, prestige, and power.

Don Bialostosky aims to teach the reading of poetry and to advance an intellectual argument that brings the sociological poetics of the Bakhtin School to an introduction to reading poetry.

Teaching Queer looks closely at student writing, transcripts of class discussions, and teaching practices in first-year writing courses to articulate queer theories of literacy and writing instruction, while also considering the embodied actuality of being a queer teacher.

Sulh is a centuries-old Arab-Islamic peacemaking practice. Rasha Diab explores the possibilities and limits of the rhetoric of sulh as it is used to resolve interpersonal, communal, and (inter)national conflicts—with a case illustrating each of these domains. The cases range from medieval to contemporary times and are analyzed using both rhetorical and critical discourse analyses.

Winner, 2017 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award

Iswari P. Pandey looks deeply into the South Asian community in Mid-South America to track the migration of literacies, showing how different meaning-making practices are adapted and reconfigured for cross-language relations and cross-cultural understanding.

This edited volume offers new and revisionary narratives of composition and rhetoric’s history. It examines composition instruction and practice at secondary schools and normal colleges, the two institutions that trained the majority of U.S. composition teachers and students during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapters provide accounts of writing instruction within contexts often overlooked by current historical scholarship.

Bringing together language and literacy studies, Asian American history and rhetoric, and critical race theory, Hoang uses historiography and ethnography to explore the politics of Asian American language and literacy education: the growth of Asian American student organizations and self-sponsored writing; the ways language served as thinly veiled trope for race in the influential Lau v. Nichols; the inheritance of a rhetoric of injury on college campuses; and activist rhetorical strategies that rearticulate Asian American racial identity.

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Janet Carey Eldred examines the rise of women magazine editors during the mid-twentieth century and reveals their unheralded role in creating a literary aesthetic for the American public.

In Plateau Indian Ways with Words, Barbara Monroe makes visible the arts of persuasion of the Plateau Indians, whose ancestral grounds stretch from the Cascades to the Rockies, revealing a chain of cultural identification that predates the colonial period and continues to this day.

Winner, 2016 CCCC Outstanding Book Award

In the early twentieth century, the field of anthropology transformed itself from the “welcoming science,” uniquely open to women, people of color, and amateurs, into a professional science of culture. The new field grew in rigor and prestige but excluded practitioners and methods that no longer fit a narrow standard of scientific legitimacy. In Rhetoric in American Anthropology, Risa Applegarth traces the “rhetorical archeology” of this transformation in the writings of early women anthropologists.

Recent global security threats, economic instability, and political uncertainty have placed great scrutiny on the requirements for U.S. citizenship. The stipulation of literacy has long been one of these criteria. In Producing Good Citizens, Amy J. Wan examines the historic roots of this phenomenon, looking specifically to the period just before World War I, up until the Great Depression. During this time, the United States witnessed a similar anxiety over the influx of immigrants, economic uncertainty, and global political tensions.Citing numerous literacy theorists, Wan analyzes the correlation of reading and writing skills to larger currents within American society. She shows how early literacy training coincided with the demand for laborers during the rise of mass manufacturing, while also providing an avenue to economic opportunity for immigrants.

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Throughout history, people have appropriated and reconstructed rhetorical and religious resources to create effective arguments. In the process, they have remade both themselves and their communities. This volume offers notable examples of these reconstructions, ranging from arguments that occurred during the formation of Christianity to contemporary arguments about the relationship of religious and academic ways of knowing.