Describing a service-learning project in Chicago public housing, the author argues for a reconception of counterpublics that takes the individual (and individual development) as the primary unit of analysis. The real question for service-learning educators, he suggests, is not whether the private and the public can inform each other, but whether we are prepared to discern the ways in which they already do inform each other in the communities we wish to serve. The students in the project developed a much broader conception of themselves as members of the human family, with the consequence that, although social problems in public housing were not changed, public discourse and private convictions about race in those communities were altered, suggesting that cultural difference may be less of a problem and more of a resource in service learning courses.

Reviewed are: Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition, by Anis Bawarshi; The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change, edited by Richard M. Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko; and Writing Genres, by Amy J. Devitt.

Seconding Johnathon Mauk’s call in these pages for greater attention to the politics of space, and extending it to the increasingly ubiquitous realities of virtual space, the author argues that course-management software systems such as Blackboard naturalize certain constructions of subjectivity for us and our students in ways inimical to our pedagogical goals. He argues that we and our students should not only be critically attentive to such constructions but should also wherever possible develop our own local, discipline-specific spaces in resistance to the homogenization of space and subjectivity they represent.

Through an examination of the work of the nineteenth-century American rhetorician Henry Noble Day the author suggests that the causal relationship usually identified between economic formations and genres such as exposition is not a purely one-way process. Day’s rhetorics, he argues, were not only shaped by the economies of Taylorism but also were themselves engaged in a sociohistorical process of class formation, suggesting that such a study of the connections among managerialism, current-traditional rhetoric, and class formation raises important questions for our own work today.

Booth and Elbow engage in a dialogue about what has become even more important in recent years, namely how we come to believe what we believe and convince others to believe with us. Booth speculates that one needs to commit oneself to combating both dogmatism and skepticism by embracing the rhetoric of assent, and offers rules to help us “learn how to listen”; Elbow agrees with Booth on a number of points but argues for the special value of dissent, perhaps even “unreasonable” dissent, before going on to offer specific classroom practices that can advance their common goal of critical thinking.

Reviewed are The Selected Essays of Robert J. Connors,edited by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford; Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History, by David R. Russell; Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States, by Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen; and Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910, by Nan Johnson.

A response to Wayne Booth's essay in the same issue a "rhetoric of assent."

Rereading the work of Letitia Elizabeth Landon in light of Hugh Blair’s 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, the author suggests that current disciplinary definitions of the sublime that separate its aesthetic heritage from its rhetorical foundations suppress those of its aspects that were the particular province of women writers in the nineteenth century, and limit our current understanding.

Tracing the revisions Frederick Douglass made as his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) metamorphosed into My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and ultimately into the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892), the author suggests that, while much attention has focused on Douglass’s seizing a “forbidden literacy” in transforming himself from object to subject, the crucial, and ever-increasing, role of African American vernacular traditions in his writing should be recognized.

Booth and Elbow engage in a dialogue about what has become even more important in recent years, namely how we come to believe what we believe and convince others to believe with us. Booth speculates that one needs to commit oneself to combating both dogmatism and skepticism by embracing the rhetoric of assent, and offers rules to help us “learn how to listen“; Elbow agrees with Booth on a number of points but argues for the special value of dissent, perhaps even “unreasonable” dissent, before going on to offer specific classroom practices that can advance their common goal of critical thinking.

hile much of the critical attention paid to Frederick Douglass addresses his use of literacy to find voice and being in his ascendancy from slave to man, his employment of vernacular tradition to tell his story in his own way often goes unnoted.1 An examination of the revisions Douglass made as his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) metamorphosed into My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and ultimately into the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892) reveals a skilled writer giving increasing attention to traditions within the circle that validate the cultural legitimacy of his African American antecedents. From edition to edition Douglass expanded scenes in which an African-derived presence manifested in vernacular atavisms became an alternative to the logocentrism that erased or devalued African American expression. Why, then, do most readings of his life story focus mainly on Douglass's relationship to the written word? typical critical paradigm reads Douglass as a black object transforming itself into subject by seizing a forbidden literacy. A sampling of some of the many fine scholars espousing this view includes Lisa Yun Lee, who notes, The connection between the power of thinking and speech is realized as Douglass the silent marginalized man transitions to active individual when a mistress cracks an opening in the white discourse. She offers to teach him to read(55); such a sampling would also include Eric Sundquist, who observes that Douglass's autobiographical writ-

The author offers a local, institutional microhistory of the work of William Leonidas Mayo, a figure who both exemplifies and complicates some of our more recent concepts of student-centered pedagogy, both to enrich our understanding of our disciplinary history and to illuminate trends in English studies of continuing interest to contemporary teachers and scholars.

The author suggests that Saul Alinsky’s concept of community organization, a theory of action devised for neighborhoods rather than for higher education, might offer a new model of service-learning, and describes the Community Educators’ Collaborative at Temple University as one example of how such a model might work.

Reviewed are Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction, edited by Pamela Takayoshi and Brian A. Huot, and Silicon Literacies: Communication, Innovation and Education in the Electronic Age, edited by Ilana Snyder.

instruction and service-learning over the last few years. Studies in the midto late nineties described courses and institutional arrangements and began to explore the ramifications for composition and English studies (Schutz and Gere; Herzberg; Peck, Flower, and Higgins). Linda Adler-Kassner and her colleagues edited an influential volume in 1997 that signaled the arrival of this new approach as a major pedagogical movement, and in 2000 Tom Deans's Writing Partnerships gave us a basic framework for thinking about the cooperative relationship between students and the organizations they encounter in these courses. More recent work has focused on how community-based learning can be sustained over time through faculty research (Cushman), how to address the gap between community and academic discourses (Chaden, Graves, Jolliffe, and Vandenberg), and what contradictions we must struggle with in intercultural inquiry (Flower), each study highlighting strategies for respecting the needs and abilities of participating community partners. In a crucial step toward establishing the institutional structures necessary for sustained partnership, Jeffrey T. Grabill and Lynde Lewis Gaillet have urged us to focus on the interface between writing programs and community partners. The need for a balanced and nonexploitive relationship in community-based learning asserts itself insistently in our discussions of this approach, and clearly at this stage writing program administrators must become much more active in developing institutional models that promise true mutual benefits for postsecondary schools and their off

The author raises several issues regarding cultural shifts over the last half-century that he believes were evaded in the Fall 2002 Partisan Review symposium that gives his article its title—including attitudes toward mass culture, the significance and aims of cultural studies, the roles and institutional affiliations of the conservative counterintelligentsia, and the question of intellectual honesty and civility—in the hope of fostering a more productive dialogue between right and left than has recently been the case.

Recognizing that critical thinking is enhanced by an engagement with diversity, the author illustrates how race can usefully be addressed in a predominantly white classroom through a local pedagogy that respects and addresses the complexities of students’ often contradictory experiences of race, rather than essentializing whiteness or identifying it only with white privilege.

In contrast to the idea that students’ instrumental views of their own education are necessarily productive of conservative middle-class values, the author describes a “work memoir” project he has developed in which working-class students reflect on and articulate their own values, memories, and expectations related to work. The students in the project, four of whom are discussed in detail in the essay, reveal far more complex concerns of identity, social capital, and acculturation.

The author explores his vexation with David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” in terms of its assumptions about class. He suggests that it both negates his own experience as a member of the working class and of the pedagogy he employs as a teacher of writing with middle-class students, given its insistence on mimicry of a dominant discourse that involves a betrayal of self for both working-class and middle-class learners of academic discourse.

The editors place this special issue in context as part of a deepening and expanding of class-based analysis in English studies, representing a second generation of scholarship on class that builds on but also at times questions previous work in the field.

The essay argues that the homophobia that persists in some leftist thinking results in an impoverished and undialectical understanding of class and class consciousness. Through attention to works by John Rechy and James Baldwin, the author illustrate that categories of oppression such as class, gender, sexual orientation, and race cannot be used as analogies of one another but rather are mutually imbricated and mutually constitutive.

Challenging views of working-class white students that either displace all white racism onto them or, at best, see them as having exchanged class consciousness for race privilege, the author argues for a critical race pedagogy that includes a more complex image of poor and working-class whites. She argues for both deconstructive pedagogies that can expose the role of language in maintaining racist and classist structures and reconstructive pedagogies that can provide students with the rhetorical tools for employing language transformatively.

The essay considers how teachers might perform emotional engagements that students find authentic and valuable within scenes of literacy instruction, suggesting that instructors’ “acting” of affect might be needed to forestall the tendency for instructors either to retain a position outside the affect generated in the classroom and merely “manage” the affective work done by students, or to impose their own affective commitments on students’ inquiry. Such a pedagogy might enable students, and particularly working-class students, to locate their own affectively structured experiences of class within more integrated understandings of social structures and identity formation.

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m ecently reprinted in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, David Bartholomae's the University is now a recognized classic in the field of composition theory. I admired the article, when I first read it over twenty years ago, as a telling criticism of writing as process. I also found it vexing, and still do. I use my vexation with Inventing as a catalyst for rumination on my social trajectory. My vexation is intimately related my passage from the working the middle class. I read Inventing as the negation both of my own educational experience as a member of the working class and of the pedagogy I employ as a teacher of writing with middle-class students. It is a tribute the power of Inventing, now seen as an early example of social constructionism, that I am not the only person more recently vexed by it. Thomas Newkirk and Nancy Welch are also. I use their particular responses Inventing as a way define my own. Newkirk points more my problem with the implications of Inventing for my view of education: making the move into university discourse is not simply a matter of inventing but also of uprooting. Welch points more my problem with Inventing as implying a narrative of academic socialization distinctly different from the socializing process I underwent. At the core of Inventing is Bartholomae's analysis of the function of the commonplace in student writing. He illustrates his claims through reference short student writings produced in response a prompt on creativity. One student writes, Creativity me, means being free express yourself in a way that is unique you (148). Bartholomae comments that with his use of to me the student appropriates a commonplace as his own. Further, this act of appropriation constitutes his as a writer (149). Bartholomae argues that one's authority as an academic

“As if the problem of racism outside of the academy isn’t enough,” the author says, “try thinking about the ways it has informed the very notion of academy and maintains a presence in our academic institutions.” He reflects on his own position in the academy as racialized subject, educand, and educator, departing from Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of an “autoethnography” to engage in a “selfiography,” in the process interrogating not only notions of “blackness” but also the too-often-naturalized assumptions of whiteness.

[T]he Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans .[. .1 are news today because of their nationalism [. ..] examples the black [people] in this country should use in [our] struggle for independence. (And that is what the struggle remains, for independence-from the political, economic, social, spiritual and psychological domination of the white man). The struggle is not simply for equality, or betterjobs, or better schools, and the rest of those half-hearted liberal cliches; it is to completely free the black [people]from the domination of the white man. Nothing else. -LeRoi Jones

Focusing on the rhetorical work of definition in the writings of Maria Rentería, Sara Estela Ramírez, and Astrea, contributors in the early years of the twentieth century to the Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica, this essay argues that these writers redefined who the Mexican woman was and what her role in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico could be. Its exploration of their definitional claims historicizes Chicana feminist rhetoric, and examines how their work infuses rhetorics of/from color with concerns of gender and class.

Malea D. Powell, Down by the River, or How Susan La Flesche Picotte Can Teach Us about Alliance as a Practice of Survivance, College English, Vol. 67, No. 1, Special Issue: Rhetorics from/of Color (Sep., 2004), pp. 38-60

n 1910 and 1911, Maria Renteria, Sara Estela Ramirez, and Astrea3 redefined who the woman4 was and what her role in the borderlands of Texas and Mexico could be. As contributors to La Crdnica, a Spanish-language newspaper based in Laredo, Texas, these three women called their female readers to refuse essentialist definitions that described women as second-class, subservient, and apolitical.5 The writings of Renteria, Ramirez, and Astrea stood in contrast to such constructions as they inscribed women as intelligent and honorable-as women who could, and indeed should, engage in and change the world around them. Renteria, Ramirez, and Astrea wrote to shift old and shape new definitions, but even as they shared this goal, each writer composed a different Mexican woman for her readers. Astrea persuaded her readers to reassess their education and their place outside the home in her two articles To the Woman Who

She is a contradiction in stereotypes, not to be pegged. He likes her right off. She wants to go to Belltown, the Denny Regrade, to take photos. He wants to go along. He does, feeling insecure and full of bravado, slipping into the walk of bravado he had perfected as a child in Brooklyn. Stops into a small cafieat the outskirts ofdowntown, at the entry to the Regrade. It's a Frenchstyle cafi, the Boulangerie, or some such. To impress her, he speaks French. Une tasse de caf6, s'il vous plait. Et croissants pour les deux. Don't laugh. It's how he said it.

The author stretches the bounds of what we might think can and can’t be done in Pidgin, both by statement and by example: “Lotta times I get back all kine disorganized papahs dat grammatically no even make sense. But wen I tell da students dat […] I like dem write for fun, I walk around da room and I see lotta da kids stay writing in Pidgin like das da voice dat comes most natural to dem. And I’m looking over their shoulders and I’m all like WOW, dey get ideas. Stay organize. And can understand too.”

Tracing her own efforts to assert her Cherokee ancestry, the author considers what is at stake for the more than four million mixed-bloods in the United States and suggests that individual nations must find some way to acknowledge those who wish to claim their heritage. She argues that finding a way to accept unenrolled mixed-blood peoples will allow indigenous nations to accrue greater political and cultural power in this country.

I wuz inspired for write dis piece aftah I saw Balaz's Hawaiian Concrete Poetry series on display.1 One time I wen fo' check outJoe at one of his readings and I toll 'em Joe brah, your concrete poems, dey pretty SOLID. He go laugh. So den I wen ax 'em, Eh, you eva tot about making one Pidgin Concrete series And he tot about 'em fo' awhile den he wuz all like Eh Lee, YOU should go try. So I wuz tinking shooots, I go chance 'em. Now, wen you look at Test Your Pidgin P.O.V. tell me wot you guys see? Wot?! Oooo, so much negativity brah; no can. I use dis poem wen I go around for talk to classrooms, public, private, intermediate school, high school, college, anykine, and das da first answer dat students usually give me too-NO CAN. So many Pidgin pessimists. Can you come up wit one more positive way of looking at dis piece o'wot? Try tink. Right on. Ho, you get 'em. Das how. We get ONE Pidgin optimist in da house. I like dis piece, not ony cuz I wrote 'em, but cuz da ting mirrors actual life. We's brought up for believe dat we cannot do certain tings if we talk Pidgin. So ass why upon da initial examination, da negative reading is wot most people arrive at first. In da real world get planny Pidgin prejudice, ah. Dey, da ubiquitous dey, dey is everywea brah; dey say dat da perception is dat da standard english talker is going automatically be perceive fo' be mo' intelligent than da Pidgin talker regardless wot

blood American Indians/Alaskan Natives, while just over four million designate their racial identity as mixed-blood.2 In my home state of North Carolina, records indicate that fewer than 100,000 people are full-blood American Indians/Alaskan Natives, while over 130,000 people are mixed-bloods. Russell Thornton suggests that the substantial increase in the Native American population since the turn of the twentieth century is due to several factors, including increased life expectancies, higher fertility and birth rates, and decreased stigmatizing of people of mixed ancestry who admit such status. I am one of the mixed-bloods who comes from a background where people attempted to hide their origins (see Bizzaro). My family's effort to avoid being jailed for evading the evacuation of the Cherokee led them to hide in the mountains of Georgia and deny their heritage in an effort to blend into the dominant culture.

The author challenges the rhetoric of “inclusion” of the voices of people of color, with its implicit reiteration of a hierarchy of center and margin, to suggest instead the more powerful possibilities offered by alliance. The example of Susan La Flesche Picotte, an enrolled member of the Omaha Nation with mixed ancestry and an unconflicted identity, who was able to ally herself with and participate fully in both European American and Indian cultures, illustrates this complex and productive rhetorical approach and its possibilities for what the author terms “survivance.”

Looking at arguments put forth by courts, the State of Hawai‘i, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty activists, as well as constructions of Hawaiianness by Native Hawaiians and Locals on the mainland, the author analyzes a rhetorical shift from celebrations of cultural identity to assertions of nationhood and sovereignty on the part of Native Hawaiians that has at times made nonnative Locals feel displaced in the only “home” they have known. Both groups have had to deal with a legacy of U.S. imperialism and injustice, placing them at times in coalition to confront racism and at times in conflict.

The author takes us back through his own and his family’s stories and histories to suggest that while academic discourse can be cognitively powerful it needs to be supplemented by memory and story, in our classrooms and in our scholarship. Memoria, mother of the muses, complements academic discourse’s strengths in logos and in ethos with pathos, providing an essential element in the rhetorical triangle, and, crucially, validating the experiences of people of color that might otherwise be silenced.

Friends and colleagues remember Wendy Bishop.