Disciplinary histories of composition studies argue that the mission of communication programs shifted during World War II: from striving to democratize higher education to promoting uncritical patriotism. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) rarely figure into these histories, in part because they seldom appeared in the era’s scholarly publications. Recently digitized African American newspaper archives invite a counter narrative of wartime democratizing pedagogy. Press coverage highlights the Hampton Institute Communications Center, the most widely publicized and politicized site of literacy instruction during the war. The controversy it engendered shows Hampton and other HBCU curricula forwarding wartime literacies that constituted patriotic resistance to Jim Crow segregation.

This special issue takes up a singular question: What would it mean to incorporate social justice into our writing assessments? This issue aims to foreground the perspectives of contributors whose voices are not typically heard in writing assessment scholarship: non-tenure-track faculty, HBCU WPAs, researchers interested in global rhetorics, queer faculty, and faculty of color. These voices have too often not been heard in writing assessment scholarship. There is no doubt that the first step toward projects of social justice writing assessment is to listen to those who have not been heard, to make more social the project of socially just writing assessment. The guest editors argue that there is much to be learned by making the writing assessment “scene,” as Chris Gallagher would say, more inclusive.

Our fields need stories that are unwelcome—stories that bother us because we have not fully embraced the notions that our identities matter in our scholarship, our teaching, and our lives. We also need to embrace the multifaceted, intersectional nature of identity, and we need new strategies for engaging in cross-boundary discourses. I offer a queer reading of the work of three African American rhetoricians to explicate three concepts that are critical for engaging in responsible cross-boundary discourse as well as three trajectories for moving forward.

Provides a mini-autoethnography of three institutional moments in which the author saw a set of conditions that invited him to speak or write as a gay academic to make political interventions in dominant culture. Explores three important issues that are often unacknowledged in everyday discussions of homosexuality: exposing heteronormativity as heterosexism, moving beyond invisibility, and the trap of "double consciousness."

Explores the possibility of seeing in Toni Morrison’s novel, “Song of Solomon,” the co-existence of two narratives of subjectivity. Examines the extent to which the application of a Western and non-Western narrative of subject formation yields conflicting interpretations of the novel and, in particular, the novel’s ending.

Discusses how “I Have a Dream” is the product of African-American rhetorical traditions of ceremonial protest and jeremiad speech-making, rituals that had crystallized long before King was born. Describes the peaceful essences of the March on Washington and how it was a “Ceremonial Protest.” Considers the historical use of “I Have a Dream” over the previous 130 years.

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Critics have failed to account adequately for Ishmael Reed's recent fiction, and generally dismiss it as less interesting than his more controversial early writing. These recent novels seem more straightforward in their plots and messages, and much less experimental in method. I would like to suggest, however, that this apparent clarity is part of a complex and innovative style. We might characterize this style as in the broadest and most pervasive sense-that is, its overall narrative strategies at the level of plot, theme and character are constructed primarily on the way the audience will read and even misread the novel. Reed broadens the definition of the rhetorical aspects of the literary text as part of a larger attempt to reformulate how his own works relate to the AfricanAmerican tradition. Critics have noted that African-American writers often are particularly aware of their precursors and tradition. Reed, however, not only carefully situates himself in relation to tradition in the abstract, but also anticipates in the novel's plot and structure the reactions of actual readers who share that tradition only in a problematic way. Indeed, in Reed's recent fiction this problematic reception of the work becomes the primary content of the novel. The implications of this move force us to reconsider how we are to trace the African-American tradition and to what degree that tradition can remain independent of the readings given it by mainstream American literary culture. I would like to explore such rhetorical workings in one particular recent novel, Reckless Eyeballing (1986). Critics and reviewers unanimously agree that Ishmael Reed is assaulting feminism in Reckless Eyeballing. His protagonist, Ian Ball, is called a notorious sexist, and yet we are invited to suffer with Ball during his persecution at the hands of powerful women in the theatre world. When Reed climactically summarizes Ball's victimization by revealing him as two-headed, he seems to be using that common African-American trope of black double-consciousness. This trope defines black consciousness as split into two identities, one acceptable to and partially created by the white hegemony, the other more authentic but disturbing to that same mainstream society. But if we simply read the trope conventionally, we stumble straight into Reed's trap, and this is what critics

William J. Spurlin, Theorizing Signifying(g) and the Role of the Reader: Possible Directions for African-American Literary Criticism, College English, Vol. 52, No. 7, African-American Criticism (Nov., 1990), pp. 732-742