In Madison, Wisconsin, a series of debates occurred about the possible establishment of a sister-city relationship with Rafah, a city in Gaza. The tension and miscommunication within these debates point to the value of taking what the author terms an exilic rhetorical position, a stand that would not be tied to claims of firm identity or territoriality.

Given the multiple meanings of rhetoric and composition, as well as the vexed history of institutional relationships between these two terms, it is important for scholars to trace how they are “worked”—that is, how they materially function—in a variety of specific circumstances.

The author responds to the essays in this special issue by noting that they emphasize the importance of careful, complex comparisons between Western and Chinese rhetorical traditions.

The history of American imperialism, as well as China’s strong presence on the contemporary global scene, should encourage American scholars of rhetoric to look beyond the nation-state and study other rhetorical traditions such as Chinese practices of argument. A debate during the Western Han dynasty over the country’s economic policies illustrates how official-orators discursively engaged one another while representing various philosophical orientations. This debate also reminds us of how important the values of humanity, empathy, and responsibility should be in contemporary rhetorical education.

Identifying the specific complexities and historical context of post-Mao Chinese literary women’s rhetoric, along with ways they have been misread, the author argues in general that Western feminist critics need to be cautious about applying their concepts to non-Western women’s literature.

Examining two particular texts and applying modifications of Western feminist concepts, the author argues that early twentieth-century Chinese women’s writing contains feminist thoughts and textual strategies far more complex and nuanced than conventional wisdom has led us to expect.

The author calls for scholars of rhetoric and composition to become familiar with the cosmology, language, educational attitudes, speech genres, and intellectual debates of a specific culture other than their own. For a case study, she turns to Chinese history and focuses on exchanges between three models of rhetoric: Confucian, Daoist, and Legalist.

The guest editor introduces this special issue on Chinese rhetoric by emphasizing that we should (1) focus on how the Chinese engaged their domestic and foreign Other; (2) be prepared to acknowledge and validate voices that call for or search for other paradigms; and (3) resist the temptation to codify any definitions of rhetoric even as we seek non-Western alternatives.

Historians of composition and rhetoric need to question the grand narratives that so far have predominated in their field, including those that turn particular figures like Fred Newton Scott into lone heroes.

Reviewed are Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University by William Clark; Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World by Catherine Prendergast; How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation by Marc Bousquet; and Inside the Teaching Machine: Rhetoric and the Globalization of the U.S. Public Research University by Catherine Chaput.

Reviewed are Making Writing Matter: Composition in the Engaged University by Ann Feldman; City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America by David Fleming; and Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World by Nancy Welch.

In the post-Civil War United States, several historically black colleges gave a central role to classical rhetoric in their curricula, and many of their students used its concepts to develop a distinctly black, oppositional public sphere.

In reporting their research, historians of rhetoric and composition should be more explicit and specific about their investigative methods.

In her influential 1988 essay, “Fighting Words,” Jane Tompkins argued that the arguments typically made by literary critics are characterized by an aggressive competitiveness that amounts to violence. But, as Tompkins’s own rhetorical strategies demonstrate, at least as deplorable are the practices whereby critics render certain people anonymous.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, various Mexican women journalists pioneered a mestiza rhetoric that was resistant to oppressive ideologies.

The border rhetorics that Latino/a students bring into the classroom can help them and other students resist being appropriated by academic discourse. For example, the corrido involves a mimicry of conventions that enables students to envision a fluid identity rather than exchange one identity for another.

The author recounts his efforts to find out about Puerto Rican activist Pedro Albizu Campos, who was imprisoned chiefly because of his rhetoric.

Contemporary Chicano codex rhetorics subversively question the alleged superiority of Western writing traditions, while reminding us that Mesoamerican pictographs have been an important—although repressed—part of rhetorical history.

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The current interest in multimodal rhetoric was anticipated by Jacob Riis’s social documentary texts and presentations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast with the socialist urban critiques presented by Friedrich Engels, Riis’s work demonstrated profound ambivalence toward the city’s poor. While calling for reform of their living conditions, Riis subjected them to surveillance and depicted them as potential revolutionaries whom the upper classes should fear.

Reviewed are "Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States" by Jean Ferguson Carr, Stephen L. Carr, and Lucille M. Schultz; "The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace" by David B. Downing; and "Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres" by Hugh Blair, edited by Linda Ferreira-Buckley and Michael S. Halloran.

Study of the weekly Methodist newspaper "Christian Advocate", from its inception in 1826 to 1832, reveals that Methodist women came to assume important, public, and rarely acknowledged rhetorical roles. More precisely, women moved beyond the confines of the newspaper’s “Ladies’ Department,” the back-page space to which “women’s concerns” were initially consigned.

This special issue on feminist rhetorics and transnationalism challenges the disciplinary defining of rhetoric and composition around U.S.-centric narratives of nation, nationalism, and citizenship. Such defining has tended to focus on feminist and women’s rhetorics only within the borders of the United States or Western Europe. The result is, potentially, the reproduction of institutional hierarchies. Transnationality refers to movements of people, goods, and ideas across national borders and, like the term borderland, it is often used to highlight forms of cultural hybridity and intertextuality. To bring a transnational focus to our field will require new methodologies and critical comparativist perspectives, which in turn may shift our objects and areas of study.

This essay examines Azar Nafisi’s bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), in the context of U.S. book club culture. It argues that the memoir appeals to U.S. audiences by mobilizing a neoliberal rhetoric and a pedagogy of empathy that positions the United States as the geopolitical center of feminist empowerment and human rights.

Despite the important work emerging from both the global and digital turns in rhetoric and composition studies, one key area has yet to be examined: the central role that the circulation of digital texts plays in the transformation and appropriation of feminist discourse. This article proposes a new methodology for analyzing the processes through which the modes of global circulation of digital representations become rhetorical and, ultimately, political actions. Feminist rhetorical studies must extend its analyses to examine how the modes of digital circulation matter in the mediation of relations among groups, communities, and nations because this digital circulation often constructs and reinforces binary oppositions and rhetorics of superiority.

The author examines the history and rhetoric of the Slow Food movement, relating it in particular to protests against globalization.

Links among the World Bank’s gender-mainstreaming policies and recent U.S. welfare policies demonstrate how transnationalism enables international gendered logics to become national (and international) norms. The metaphor of the network helps feminist rhetoricians expose how transnational linkages shape domestic and international policies by articulating the complex relationships among gendered logics, power, and occasion.

The author surveys various characteristics of contemporary food writing, identifying not only technical features but ways in which such texts shape and invite certain kinds of reader response.

The author responds to the editors’ introduction, as well as to the articles by Queen, Dingo, and Kulbaga, emphasizing that feminists need to relate theories of rhetoric to theories of transnationalism if both areas of thought are to be useful.

Reviewed is Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition by Steven Mailloux.

Drawing on activity theory, the author describes and analyzes how he uses software to determine whether websites administered by his university are accessible to disabled people. He argues that, ultimately, accessibility is a rhetorical construct, in the sense that it is defined by communities rather than by sheer technical measurements.

Reviewed are Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, by Sharon Crowley, and Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, by Krista Ratcliffe.

When evangelical Christian students enter the academy, they often find that its tenets and values conflict with their reliance on the Bible as a source of truth and evidence. A pedagogy of rhetorical dexterity, however, can help construct productive relationships between their religious community of practice and the academy’s.

Freak-show theories developed in disability studies can help us analyze how students with disabilities rhetorically represent these in college admissions essays. In particular, such theories draw attention to the social conditions that affect how disabilities are conceived and treated as well as depicted.

Teaching films like Crash gives teachers and researchers the opportunity to discuss films as social texts that engage students in critical thinking and self-reflection. This particular movie is especially effective in its use of a pulp-fiction visual rhetoric. Unfortunately, the film equates and replaces the term “race” with the term “prejudice” and then argues that everyone is a little prejudiced. The result is a missed opportunity to investigate whiteness as a powerful social construction.

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.

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.

What do we want students to know, what do we want them to have after completing a series of courses in college English? College English ought to provide students with certain communicative that enable them to ana lyze rhetorical effect and produce rhetorically effective texts, including those to be read, those to be viewed as images, those to be heard, and those not to be heard. Especially exciting is the expanding body of knowledge centered on visual, aural, and silent texts. Within the past five years, new books on visual rhetoric, the rhetoric of silence, and the rhetoric of listening have joined guides to analysis and production of printed texts (see, e.g., Faigley et al.; Glenn; Ratcliffe). This trend signals increasing recognition of the need to develop nondiscursive communication skills, that college English should engage itself in perfecting. I use the term skills unapologetically. Although many in English studies are uncomfortable with the idea that we should teach skills?claiming instead that we teach texts or au thors?I think it is just the right word. Ultimately what students remember about

We all have a vision of what might be. For some of us, this vision involves a strong emphasis on rhetoric and writing; for others, it en compasses a sustained commitment to literary study and analysis. Still others might argue for the merits of communications technologies and the inclu sion of new-media-based forms of reading, writing, and speaking into the curricu lum. Regardless of these emphases, most would agree that English should foster an understanding of how human beings use language aesthetically and rhetorically in ways that matter for culture, civic society, and meaningful human existence. Lacking from most discussions of college English, though, is how students learn to make the connection between this humanities-based understanding of language and the world of work, which is often unfairly harnessed to utilitarian images. It's true that many departments have sought to alleviate this gap by encouraging internships for stu dents, but there's little agreement on how these internships should be supervised and what guidance should be provided for students. At the heart of internship initia tives is the attempt to make English curricula directly relevant to workplace situa tions. Much research exists in professional and technical writing on the role of

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.

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.

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.

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.

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With the inauguration of Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writ ing and Rhetoric, composition scholars now have access to student writing that is not accompanied by?and therefore not represented as an instantiation of?the peda gogical apparatus that has historically accompanied the publication of student writ ing in composition studies' flagship journals. Students from schools as varied as the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Oberlin College, and Messiah College publish their work in this new undergraduate rheto ric and writing journal founded by scholars Laurie Grobman and the late Candace Spigelman of Penn State Berks-Lehigh Valley. As is the case with any other work published in a journal, authors' full names, institutional affiliations, and short bios are provided. Each essay that appears in Young Scholars has been reviewed by peers

The author uses a discussion of Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven to argue that cross-racial voicing on the part of white writers may in fact express an attempt to acknowledge and perhaps explore the rhetorical efficacy of a black ethos. At the same time, the author suggests that English studies scholars of all races need to create forums where cross-racial voicing can be explored, that white English professors must continue to interrogate hegemonic attempts to control and colonize African American discourse, and that teachers should design assignments that help students gain insights into the historical and contemporary struggles blacks face to characterize their own discursive practices.

The author argues that the new journal Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric offers access to student writing outside of the pedagogical apparatus that has historically accompanied the publication of such writing, and in the process challenges composition’s standard practice of citing students by first name only. Young Scholars in Writing, as representative of the disciplinary shift from a conception of writing as verb to writing as noun, compels composition studies to consider the affective aspect of citation, which often goes unremarked.

The author describes the issues raised for him by team-teaching a course on the Shoah that aimed to incorporate familial, historical, and rhetorical perspectives. Considering firsthand testimonies, songs written by camp inmates, renderings of others’ stories such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and works of fiction and poetry by writers without firsthand experience of the Shoah, he is ultimately led to wonder whether the stories of those who underwent such experiences stand utterly outside critique and appropriation and may demand of us instead only that we never forget.

Reviewed are Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, edited by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick; Defining Visual Rhetorics, edited by Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers; The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film, edited by David Blakesley; and Tuned In: Television and the Teaching of Writing, by Bronwyn T. Williams.