Stephen Parks’s book "Class Politics" fails to convey the complex interplay of social movements (including Black Power and socialism) behind the Statement on Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Attention to this rich history enables a better understanding of African American discourses than is provided in another influential book, Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children.

“Crash” is the worst kind of representation of what passes for multiculturalism today. A class will gain most from studying its construction of whiteness, including whiteness’s inextricable connections to “otherness(es).”

“Crash”’s most disturbing lesson seems to be that everybody—even a mean, sadistic cop—has a good side and reasons for his or her racist acts, for which they can be forgiven. This emphasis is a failure to analyze the heterogeneity of experiences among members of various races and ethnicities. Nevertheless, the film is worth teaching, especially if a class compares it with a film such as Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. Lee’s documentary on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans is a model for reconstructing with students a history and system of beliefs and practices, so that they deepen their analysis of any cultural phenomenon, artifact, or event.

Reviewed are What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain and Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year by James M. Lang.

Within nineteenth-century American rhetorical culture, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s contribution was distinct. Envisioning a rhetoric that linked imagination with social action, he challenged the more mechanistic, reason-centered tendencies of rhetorical doctrines influenced by Hugh Blair.

Many graduate creative writing programs depend on “star” faculty who have been hired more because of their professional reputation as writers than because of their commitment to teaching. As a result, such programs often fail to provide reflection on teaching that would truly serve their students. One step toward alleviating this problem is to offer undergraduate courses that enable creative writing graduate students to team-teach with regular faculty.

The author identifies limitations in various approaches that Westerners have taken to non-Western rhetorical traditions. Focusing on excerpts from the Analects of Confucius, he demonstrates his own proposed approach to ancient Chinese rhetoric, emphasizing that Westerners studying it should seek to identify its discursive fields while also reflecting on their own conditions.

The authors call for tying service learning to feminist agendas. In particular, they emphasize civic activism involving true collaboration with communities. They report on a graduate seminar at their own university that worked toward this goal by having students self-reflectively participate in local organizations.

Robinson Crusoe demonstrates that John Locke’s principle of tolerance actually entails exclusions, for Crusoe ultimately destroys the cannibals to protect his supposedly liberal order. This paradox has implications for the current war in Iraq, where the United States government invokes the ideal of freedom while insisting on its own particular vision of democracy.

College English departments must turn their attention to the extensive role that, for good or ill, electronic networks are playing in the circulation and very definition of writing. In part, this development involves constant fluctuation and growth of data, so that texts hardly remain fixed.

Students in college writing courses need to understand world issues, including the oppressive effects of the global economy. But their teachers need to give them a sense of agency and authority, rather than simply telling them what political positions to take. One example of a writing assignment that might engage as well as inform students involves analyzing Parade magazine’s annual list of the world’s worst dictators.

Reviewed is Making Multiculturalism: Boundaries and Meaning in U.S. English Departments by Bethany Bryson.

The author describes an undergraduate course she taught on “Representations of Slavery.” In particular, she explains how the course involved studying an historic site on her university’s campus: the former slave plantation of leading segregationist John C. Calhoun. She also analyzes how her school represents the site on its Web pages.

English faculty in community colleges feel pressured to make their composition courses acceptable for transfer to four-year schools. In particular, many of them feel obligated to emphasize academic research and argument at the expense of literature. But community college students will benefit from first-year courses that address a wide range of discourse by integrating literary study with writing instruction.

Traditional priorities of English as a discipline are now significantly at odds with the material circumstances of college English departments. To address these realities, college English needs to become literacy studies rather than literary studies.

The undergraduate English curriculum should move well beyond study of the traditional Eurocentric literary canon. It should help students participate in society by teaching them how to communicate across various languages, discourses, and media.

Traditionally, college English departments have resisted granting undergraduate internships a central place in their curricula. Many of these departments do little more than allow students to pursue internships as loosely supervised independent studies. An internship practicum course such as Purdue University’s, however, enables students to reflect together on their internships, thereby helping them understand, critique, and act upon the institutional cultures they have momentarily joined.

Although “close reading” remains a worthwhile goal for undergraduate English courses, the term has actually been defined in numerous ways, which need to be compared and assessed. Unfortunately, the version of it spread by the New Critics has intimidated students, making them feel unable to decipher a literary text’s real meaning. They need to see how literature relates to discourses with which they are already familiar.

Against the backdrop of the passionate and conflicting assessments of Jacques Derrida that followed his 2004 death, this article reviews rhetoric and composition’s scholarly appropriation of deconstruction during the 1980s and early 1990s. Contending that the field primarily used deconstruction in the service of refutation, this article positions deconstruction as a style of inheritance that could allow for a more productive encounter with theory.

Reviewed are A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, edited by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong and Stephen H. Sumida, Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, edited by King-Kok Cheung, and Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, edited by M. Evelina Galang.

The author examines how chronotopes—a term M. M. Bakhtin used to describe space-time relationships in literature—also characterize rhetorical arguments. She uses a case study of a series of debates about genetically modified foods (GMFs) in Canada to illustrate how chronotopes shape arguments along ideological lines. In particular, she suggests that dominant chronotopes, such as space-time compression or substantial equivalence, are linked with powerful ideologies, such as neoliberal capitalism or scientific positivism, in ways that limit alternative arguments based on sustainability or green politics.

Drawing on students’ literacy autobiographies, this article critiques the premise that academic discourse and working-class identity are not only static but also in complete opposition. The author argues for a more performative theory of class, a theory that would, she explains, recognize that academic discourse creates social class distinctions through processes that can be critiqued and reshaped.

The author suggests that English-only classrooms are not only the implicit goal of much language policy in the United States, but also assumed to be already the case, an ironic situation in light of composition’s historical role as “containing” language differences in U.S. higher education. He suggests that the myth of linguistic homogeneity has serious implications not only for international second-language writers in U.S. classrooms but also for resident second-language writers and for native speakers of unprivileged varieties of English, and that rather than simply abandon the placement practices that have worked to contain—but also to support—multilingual writers, composition teachers need to reimagine the composition classroom as the multilingual space that it is, where the presence of language differences is the default.

The authors explore the interdependent relationships between learning English(es) and learning digital literacies in global contexts, and, collaborating with two women who have moved and continue to move between the United States and Asia, highlight the crucial role that the practice of guanxi has played in advancing digital literacies. Their collaboration suggests that guanxi is a useful term for describing not only the multifarious constellations of connections and resources that structure the lives of individuals, but also for understanding how these connections are related to the social, cultural, ideological, and economic formations that structure the “information age.”

The author reads the essays in this issue from the perspective of work in rhetorical genre theory on the concept of “uptake” in order to examine some of the challenges and possibilities teachers as well as students face as they engage in the work of identifying and deploying multiple languages and discourses. He suggests that the essays allow us to see uptake both as a site for the operations of power and a site for intervening in those operations, as well as allowing us to see a number of such interventions underway.

Keeping in mind the Chinese character-combination yuyan, with its multiple meanings of language, parts of language, the processes of language, and the products of those processes, the author depicts English as kept alive by many people and by many different ways of using it in a wide range of personal, social, and historical contexts. She proposes four lines of inquiry “against the grain” of English-only instruction—that living-English users weigh what English can do for them against what it has done to them; that they weigh what English can do against what it cannot do; that they understand English as being in the hands of all its users; and that they focus energy on how to tinker with the very standardized usages they are pressured to “imitate”—and discusses the implications of those lines of inquiry for composition in the United States.

Tracing the effects of the “laissez-faire” postcolonial politics of language in the United States, which in fact enabled English to become the dominant language through cultural rather than institutional means, the essay then suggests how the linguistic memory that emerges from decolonization and nation building continues, often in unsuspected ways, to influence the language policy of the modern U.S. university and U.S. college composition. The author argues for a national language policy that moves beyond the notion of language as a right, with its lingering assumptions of English monolingualism as an ultimate goal, and instead fosters a linguistic culture where being multilingual is both normal and desirable.

The author suggests that models positioning the multilingual writer as passively conditioned by “interference” from his or her first language, as well as more correlative models of the interrelationships of multiple languages in writing, need to be revised. Analyzing works written to different audiences, in different contexts, and in different languages by a prominent Sri Lankan intellectual, the author instead suggests a way of understanding multilingual writing as a process engaged in multiple contexts of communication, and multilingual writers as agentive rather than passive, shuttling creatively among languages, discourses, and identities to achieve their communicative and rhetorical objectives.

The author uses the example of a text a student was not allowed to display on his course website to explore how and why institutional ideologies particular to the historical development of composition and creative writing—especially when viewed in conjunction with current copyright law—render students’ multimedia compositions illegitimate. He suggests that the ideological apparatuses of writing instruction and the legal statutes of U.S. culture at large combine to radically restrict the production and circulation of students’ multimedia texts and inhibit students’ power as writers.

Reviewed are anniversary reissues of Writing without Teachers, by Peter Elbow; Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire; and A Writer Teaches Writing, by Donald M. Murray.

Reviewed are That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, edited by Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal; Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, by Imani Perry; Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap, by Eithne Quinn; and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, by Jeff Chang.

The author reads five volumes of College English with attention to the extent to which authors account for issues of systemic difference in their writing—both in their representations of themselves as authors and in their representations of others—as one means to explore how (indeed whether) we have begun to transcend normativity in our disciplinary conversation and to identify problems in the way we deal with difference. He concludes by exploring how pedagogy and practice that deal substantively with difference are by nature transformative.