Divisive rhetoric abounds in the United States on the topic of racism. Finding productive and holistic ways of analyzing and discussing racism are vital. This essay proposes the use of the pentad method (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose) and dramatic framing from Kenneth Burke’s theory of dramatism as useful toward that end. A case study of analyzing a racial narrative is performed on Nelson Mandela’s famous 1964 Rivonia Trial speech. In this paramount speech, Mandela advocates for a pragmatic transformation through agency and uses a comic frame to address the problem of racism in Apartheid. This essay concludes with a discussion of how the pentad and dramatic framing can be used to address racism by encouraging constructive dialogue and creative rhetorical approaches.

ABSTRACT This article posits that bringing diversity to histories of rhetoric may require not only revising canons but also “unwriting” the narratives of Western civilization in which canonical figures have been cast. Two conventions of these narratives are of special significance: fixed identities and narrative coherence. Focusing on the cultural contexts of Aelius Aristides’ “Regarding Sarapis,” we suggest that these conventions obscure the cultural differences that were always there.

ABSTRACT The value of imitatio as a pedagogical tactic in rhetorical education has been attested to for millennia. But within the context of a culture of diversity, imitation becomes potentially problematic. This essay describes two attitudes toward imitatio that may contribute to modifying the practice in ways that enable it to be recovered for use in contemporary classrooms. The first entails reimagining the relationships between students and their model texts as multivalent conversations rather than dyadic exchanges; the second entails challenging the hierarchies that are implied when students are expected to model their work on texts that are considered superior. These two attitudes encourage the integration of imitatio into a rhetorical education that is essential for the cultivation of a just and engaged twenty-first century citizenship.

Rhetoric often serves as a way to bridge important differences in the act of persuasion. As a field, rhetoric has worked to include more and more diverse voices. Much more is left to be written, however, on how this admittedly important concept of diversity affects the study and practice of rhetoric. This volume of Advances in the History of Rhetoric serves as a material trace of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric’s recent attempts to highlight diversity in and among rhetorical traditions. It collects essays from those presented at the 2018 symposium on the theme of “Diversity and Rhetorical Traditions.” All of these essays were subjected to additional review to fine-tune their arguments for this special journal issue. Each displays the perils and promises of engaging diversity as a topic within – and among – rhetorical traditions. Part of the challenge of coming to terms with difference is the confrontation with something, be it a tradition, a thinker, or a text, that challenges one’s own way of understanding the world, possible accounts of it, and our structures of reasoning and justification. Marking something as “different” is better than marking that person, text, or tradition as “wrong” or “misguided.” Coming to terms with – and even simply recognizing – difference is an accomplishment, especially when it’s not followed by dismissal or rejection. We too often default to the familiar – familiar texts and standards of judgment.These tensions over engaging differences in texts and people are the classical challenges facing comparative endeavors and the field that explores diversity among rhetorical traditions–known as comparative rhetoric – has made progress in navigating these demands. Early studies in the rhetorical practices of “non-western cultures” (a term that highlights the normative challenges of difference in naming objects of study) served as important, but imperfect, starting points. For instance, Robert T. Oliver’s 1971 book, Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China, represents one of the first sustained enquiries into the rhetoric of China and India, putatively on their own terms. It was a grand project, ambitious in its aims. Yet in his pursuit of respecting difference in these traditions from the familiar Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, some have argued that Oliver emphasized a “deficiency model” that emphasized Chinese or Indian rhetorics’ lack of some key characteristic (according to Western models of thought) such as logic or rational argument (Lu “Studies and Development” 112). George Kennedy’s ambitious book, Comparative Rhetoric, is a useful entry in bringing a global and systematic sense to the idea of comparative rhetoric, but it could also be faulted by its placement of the Greco-Roman tradition as a normative telos lying at the end of the rhetorical progression chartered over the course of its chapters.Building on the approach enshrined in these important endeavors, other scholars continued to interrogate difference among and between rhetorical traditions by focusing on similarities among different cultural practices. There is tension, however, over how much difference scholars attribute to different rhetorical traditions situated in radically different cultural contexts in the act of comparison. Are they commensurable? Do they both practice and theorize the same thing denoted by the term “rhetoric?” Another question arises as to the difference in epistemic access to these different traditions: who has the best access to unpack what a tradition means or implies about rhetoric? Some scholars give contemporary “natives” a special value as epistemically privileged resources in understanding long-rooted traditions of thought (Lu “Studies and Development” 113–114; Mao “Studying the Chinese”). Contrary to these positions which respect the rhetorical traditions of other cultures by walling them off (to some extent) from access by outsiders, other approaches deemphasize ideas of privileged access and focus on the method of appropriating resources and concepts from one tradition for the use in or by another tradition. Underlying all of these efforts and decision points are ontological assumptions about the objects of study (Is a tradition one thing or a diverse and conflicting set of texts, ideas, and authors?) and ethical entailments about the method of reconciling difference to one’s own tradition (How much creative rereading do we allow of another tradition?). Some have argued for – or at least asserted – that traditions can be “captured” in acts of scholarly inquiry more or less accurately, and we should thereby discount scholarship that fails some criterion of accuracy (Mao “Doing Comparative Rhetoric”; Hum and Lyon). Appealing to accuracy, even if it is possible to find a way to compare one’s attempts at descriptions to the “thing” that is being described, seems to overly limit how we might creatively engage, use, and understand diverse and different traditions (Stroud “Pragmatism,” “‘Useful Irresponsibility”). These debates about respect, accuracy, and appropriation intersect in complex ways with the previously mentioned tensions over whether “rhetoric” points to the same things and practices in diverse traditions. One point of agreement among many in these debates, however, remains: the reduction of traditions – or their “rhetoric” – to essential similarities or the reading of diverse traditions as absolutely (and incommensurately) different are less-than-useful orientations to engaging difference in rhetorical traditions. Both would paralyze us, perhaps in the service of cherished values (protecting or respecting the diverse Other), and they seem to preclude a full engagement with that which differs from our ordinary traditions, concepts, and practices. Beyond these extremes lies a middle path of creative and unique approaches to how we learn from, respect, and engage others. Difference is the problematic that drives the challenges to such an endeavor, as well as the ground for what we might construct in our contemporary accounts once we submit to listening to another tradition, speaker, or text outside of our habitual haunts.In their own ways, each of the studies collected here engage and respect difference within rhetorical traditions, even though there is a radical diversity in the traditions analyzed for this endeavor. This issue has a loose organizational pattern necessitated by this energetic but sometimes frenetic frame-shifting inherent in comparative rhetoric. The first two articles explore sources of diversity and difference within the Chinese tradition. Xing Lu’s keynote address extends her previous work on classical and contemporary Chinese rhetorical practices and highlights the ways that the Chinese tradition encompassed a radical diversity of thought, from Confucian views of benevolent rhetorical practice to the Daoists’ transcendental rhetoric. As she highlights, there was a remarkable amount of diversity within each “school” of Chinese rhetorical thought, and there was much conflict among and between these schools as they sought to come to terms with difference in accounts of moral cultivation, rhetorical practice, and the normative uses of language. The second article, authored by Rya Butterfield, also explores the differences in the Chinese tradition, albeit as viewed from a contemporary thinker who was pragmatically oriented toward making sense of conflicting classical schools of thought. Hu Shih, a student of John Dewey’s at Columbia University, sought in his recovery of the classical traditions of Chinese thought resources to solve pressing Chinese and international exigencies. As Butterfield discusses, Hu is modern in his engagement with Chinese classical sources, and he draws upon or uses resources from the west (including Greece) in how he rereads classical Chinese culture in light of China’s contemporary needs. In many ways, Hu’s rhetoric represents a pragmatist approach to striking (and constructing) a balance between modernization and preservation of China’s past schools of thought and habits of living.There are good reasons for diversifying our canon of rhetoric, as well as our methods and objects of study, by reaching out to other traditions around the globe, but there is also a value to recovering sources of differences in a tradition that our histories might overlook. The next three articles explore the problematic of difference within the Greco-Roman tradition, highlighting sources of overlooked diversity within a dominant tradition in western rhetorical studies. Kathleen S. Lamp’s keynote address engages various types of public epideictic artifacts in Augustan Rome and illustrates how they function as propagandistic and educational efforts to reconcile differences within the Roman populace. Lamp does an admirable job showing the needs of rhetoric in light of the diversity of the Roman public, as well as the rich functioning of public artworks and monuments that can also shed light on how American monuments might serve similar goals. In a related spirit, Robert E. Terrill’s article appropriates a vital concept for Greek and Roman rhetoricians, imitatio, and engages modern concerns with inclusion in rhetorical pedagogy and argument among a diverse public. Terrill’s piece shows that creative engagement with traditions and their resources can add nuance to our understanding, as well as amplify their relevance to contemporary concerns in our pluralistic communities. By reimagining mimetic pedagogy within a context of diversity, Terrill shows how Greco-Roman rhetorical sources allow room for inventive encounters with diverse publics. The third piece engaging diversity within the western tradition is authored by Janet M. Atwill and Josie Portz. Their study challenges contemporary extensions – and critiques – of the western tradition that assume its relative homogeneity. By exploring in more detail Aelius Aristides’ “Regarding Sarapis,” Atwill and Portz challenge simplistic readings of the western tradition by highlighting sources of difference, diversity, tension, and intercultural encounter within its supposedly straightforward history. By “unwriting” the narrative of Western civilization with an attention to tensions and differences within Aristides as received and as could be read, the authors illustrate how the thematic of difference can yield new insights into enduring traditions in the history of rhetoric.The final two articles in this issue emphasize rhetoric’s diverse history in traditions and genres that often escape our attention. Elif Guler and Iklim Goksel make important first steps in a project that should receive more attention in our field – that of explicating Turkish rhetoric. By focusing on two key rhetorical moments in the history of Turkish rhetoric, the Orkhon inscriptions (8th century) and Atatürk’s Nutuk (1927), they mark a valuable beginning to studying the rhetoric of this complex culture. These two texts are important, as the Orkhon inscriptions date from the pre-Islamic period and Atatürk is considered the founder and first president of modern Turkey. Guler and Goksel creatively show how these different texts from historically distinct times are made to speak to common and divergent interests in Turkish history, showing the promise of studying traditions different from the standard Greco-Roman one. The final article continues this engagement with long-standing traditions outside of those in many standard histories of rhetoric: that of the Hindu tradition. Elizabeth Thornton examines important hymns within the Rigveda, in light of concepts and tools taken from later sources in Indian traditions, and finds that there is a unique rhetorical use of form and voice in this foundational Hindu text. Thornton’s piece is also of interest to those attuned to the methodological challenges of engaging texts outside of the western tradition, since she offers an interesting discussion of how decolonializing rhetorical history will commit us to (sometimes) using native theoretical resources.What all of these pieces highlight is the promise of thinking of rhetoric’s history with an emphasis on divergences, tensions caused by differences, and spaces that lie between our accustomed answers and intellectual habits. Rhetoric has always been diverse and has always had to bridge over differences in the act of persuasion; our contemporary history of rhetoric and its traditions must mirror this diversity in scholarly practices. Many talk highly of inclusion and multiculturalism, but few of us read or speak of Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita, or Bhimrao Ambedkar as rhetorically interesting parts in our histories of rhetoric’s past. There is no principled reason for this oversight, and it may be rectified slowly as the world becomes more globalized and as Asian nations such as China and India gain in economic, military, and political importance. But valuing and emphasizing diversity could lead us to pay more attention to divergences both within the rhetorical tradition many of us were trained in, as well as between this tradition and the range of other grand traditions animating other regions of the globe for millennia, well in advance of such geopolitical and economic shifts. Through resisting the urge for simplistic stories and one-dimensional critiques of cultures and their values, diversifying our histories of rhetoric promises to yield new narratives and inventive readings of well-known sources that will invigorate rhetoric as a discipline.No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

This article examines the development of advanced writing curricula at a historically black public university during postrecession austerity measures. Analysis of institutional documents suggests that advocates enacted self-determined curricular changes by using strategies of subversive resilience to neoliberalism. Simultaneously accommodating and resistant, this form of resilience has roots in anticolonial, African American, and feminist responses to oppressive conditions.

This article examines the development of advanced writing curricula at a historically black public university during postrecession austerity measures. Analysis of institutional documents suggests that advocates enacted selfdetermined curricular changes by using strategies of subversive resilience to neoliberalism. Simultaneously accommodating and resistant, this form of resilience has roots in anticolonial, African American, and feminist responses to oppressive conditions.

For those of us who went to graduate school during the 1970s and 1980s, our understanding of early-modern rhetoric was shaped in large part by a preoccupation with clarifying the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. The curriculum at that time usually included a heavy dose of secondary literature by scholars in the tradition of Wilbur Samuel Howell, Karl Wallace, Douglas Ehninger, Vincent Bevilacqua, and Lloyd Bitzer. A common theme in those readings was an investment in mapping the primary texts of modern rhetorical theory against the background of metaphysics and epistemology. Occasionally, we read an essay like Walter Ong's “Ramist Method and the Commercial Mind,” which suggested a different approach to the subject. However, our interest in documenting the influence of Francis Bacon's scientific method on Joseph Priestley's theory of rhetorical invention or of explaining how George Campbell responded to David Hume's skepticism left us with little time to explore the influence of commercial culture on modern rhetorical theory—even in cases that probably should have been obvious like Adam Smith's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres or Richard Whately's Elements of Rhetoric.Today, many of us who were originally trained as historians of rhetoric find ourselves surrounded by colleagues who dismiss the history of rhetoric courses as hopelessly passé. In fact, if we're honest, even for those of us who embrace the history of rhetoric as an essential component of liberal arts education, our files of lectures about the intricacies of Enlightenment rhetorical theory can seem increasingly remote and tired. As Christopher Hill once explained, every generation is faced with the task of rewriting history in its own way: “although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors” (1972, 15). The challenge facing historians of rhetoric, in other words, is this: how do we reframe Enlightenment rhetoric to reveal its relevance in our lives today?In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, Mark Garrett Longaker suggests a “way in” to modern rhetorical theory that is likely to resonate with many twenty-first-century readers. Instead of approaching Enlightenment rhetoric as a reaction to modern theories of metaphysics and epistemology, Longaker reconfigures the subject around compelling problems of economics and ethics. For example, in an age of free-market capitalism and consumer culture, what is the moral grounding for our obligation to transparency and honesty in our rhetorical transactions? When attempting to flourish in an economic system that gives its highest rewards to self-interested instrumentalism and greed, is it still possible to cultivate a sense of altruism, honor, or loyalty toward others? And, furthermore, as we find ourselves inhabiting an increasingly privatized, competitive, and commercialized “marketplace of ideas,” how do we reconcile the values of free speech with the values of rhetorical decorum and politeness? For anyone who worries about the practical fallout of these sorts of questions, Longaker provides a compelling reminder that “our age is not exceptional. From its seventeenth-century financial beginning through its nineteenth-century industrial episode to its twenty-first century digital projection, capitalism has been thoroughly rhetorical” (11). In expanding upon this claim, Longaker proceeds recursively in relation to four case studies: John Locke on clarity, Adam Smith on probity, Hugh Blair on moderation, and Herbert Spencer on economy.Chapter 1 examines John Locke's obsession with discursive clarity and its role in commercial contracts. Traditional readings of book 3 of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (the treatment of the “abuses of words” and the remedies for those abuses) tend to place a heavy emphasis on Locke's relationship to British empirical sciences as inspired by his involvement with the Royal Society of London for the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge. While this focus on epistemology and scientific inquiry did obviously play an important role in Locke's analysis of the subject, Longaker advises historians of rhetoric that there is more to the story. His close reading of the Essay makes clear that Locke's attacks on sophistry and rhetoric are unusually vitriolic and inconsistent with other statements Locke made about the significance of verbal imprecision in the sciences. If we pay attention to the evolution of early drafts of Locke's Essay and if we read the Essay against the background of Locke's other writings on issues having to do with economics and business finance, we begin to realize that his frequent allusions to the relationship between argument and commerce and his analogies between sophistry and financial dishonesty are not just stylistic embellishments. Longaker explains that Locke's rule about linguistic propriety “is not just a stylistic guideline, nor is it principally a political suggestion. Locke believed that propriety in currency and language preserves commercial stability, since propriety depends on consent, and consent to a common medium permits financial and conversational exchange” (22). Longaker examines Locke's conception of an ethical obligation to propriety in commercial interactions. He then explains how Locke's requirement for clarity and his rule against disputation were implicated not only in his theory of natural law and social contract theory, but also in his analysis of misrepresentation in financial contracts. Longaker concludes the chapter with a survey of Locke's writings on education. He demonstrates how Locke's writings emphasized a “rhetorical pedagogy of clarity” (37) as an essential component in the education of the new merchant classes.In chapter 2, Longaker turns to Adam Smith's analysis of sincerity and probity. He begins by reviewing the common assumption that Smith's version of free-market capitalism transforms all goods and services into commodities, such that the value of bourgeois virtue is defined as a transactional calculation of prudence. As Smith said in The Wealth of Nations (1776), “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the baker, or the brewer that we expect [their probity]… but from their regard to their own interest” (Smith quoted by Longaker 44). That is to say, any claims about moral obligation within a capitalist system appear to be grounded in a claim to expedience—protecting one's reputation in the marketplace (in the short term, and also in the long term). However, as Longaker explains, this common interpretation of Smith is faulty. The interpretation persists because key passages have been read out of context. A more robust reading of Smith would strive to examine these passages against the background of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1762), and Smith's lectures on jurisprudence (c. 1754–1764). Longaker succinctly summarizes his survey of this literature by asserting that Smith did not, in fact, define probity as merely a “ruthless calculation of interest”: “Honesty may be prudent, and the prudent man may be honest, but he is not honest because he is prudent. Probity comes from a felt sense of right, which leads to an honest rhetorical style” (44). Longaker devotes most of chapter 2 to unpacking these claims—and, more generally, to explaining the recurring problem in Enlightenment ethics regarding the relationships between instrumental reason, moral feeling, habit, and ethical character. Longaker explains how Smith posited the psychological mechanism of fellow feeling or sympathy as the basis for capitalism's “two legal pillars,” property and contract (56–57). The capacity for sympathy can only be cultivated through the exercise of imagination—not through reason. With Smith, we see the beginnings of a decline in classical invention and the rise of aesthetics and belletristic criticism as dominating forces in rhetorical pedagogy. Longaker concludes the chapter with an examination of Smith's efforts “at promoting rhetorical criticism of imaginative literature to illustrate how he wanted students to study, discern, and produce honest discourse in the free arenas of civil society: the literary salon, the commodities exchange, and the rhetoric classroom” (44).Longaker presents Locke and Smith as having been generally optimistic about capitalism as a force for social improvement. Capitalism promotes rhetorical virtue in the sense that clarity is a necessary condition for meeting the obligations of financial contracts. Further, a felt sense of sympathy and of sincerity is an essential condition for becoming an effective participant in the marketplace. Later writers, however, became increasingly cynical about the relationship between virtue and commerce. Virtue and commerce “seemed sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory forces.” This ambivalence prompted the question, “Did capitalism make people good, or did good people make commerce possible?” (74). In chapter 3, Longaker takes this question as the starting point for his analysis of Hugh Blair. Conceding that Blair was not a systematic or consistent thinker, Longaker brings a sense of order to his analysis by focusing on Blair's participation in a debate among eighteenth-century intellectuals regarding the vice of licentiousness and the corrupting influence of material luxuries. Reviewing statements by writers such as Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Daniel Defoe, Longaker asserts that Blair's most important contribution to the “luxury debates” was the “bourgeois virtue of moderation” which would provide “a ballast to right a commercial ship listing toward overconsumption” (79). Specifically, “Christian morals and republican virtue teach good habits of moderate consumption and personal savings, habits that support commerce by ensuring reinvestment and by preventing overconsumption” (74). In his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Blair gave his students a guide to rhetorical moderation by crafting a synthesis between Locke's demand for verbal clarity and Smith's celebration of sentimental figures (88).In chapter 4, Longaker turns to Herbert Spencer as “the proper inheritor of the British Enlightenment's integration of ethics, economics, and style” but who, in the end, tracked the “decline and fall of rhetorical style and bourgeois virtue” (101). Spencer's essay “The Philosophy of Style” (1852) is usually remembered for its treatment of language as a source of “friction” which hinders the “machinery” of the human intellect: “the more time and attention it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the less time and attention can be given to the contained idea; and the less vividly will that idea be conceived” (Spencer quoted by Longaker 102). This famous description of the “economics of style” grew out of Spencer's work in industrial engineering and his analysis of the need for efficient communication within large corporations. But Longaker claims that this is actually the least interesting feature of Spencer's analysis of style: “More interesting and more important is Spencer's adherence to the British Enlightenment faith that rhetorical style can facilitate sympathy; will ameliorate humanity, and must advance commerce” (103). This optimism that permeated Spencer's rhetorical economics was a product of his belief in the Enlightenment's theory of historical progress. He believed in the power of capitalism—not so much as an artificial creation of human beings but as a divinely ordained necessity in human evolution. Over time, however, Spencer learned to distinguish biological evolution from social evolution. In the process, according to Longaker, he became increasingly skeptical about the role and significance of individual agency. Ultimately, Spencer's fascination with the mechanisms of a deterministic evolution led him to turn away from rhetorical education and from the imaginative arts all together. As Longaker explains, Spencer “lost faith in the individual's ability to purposefully cultivate bourgeois virtue” (123).The narrative arc of Longaker's survey is clear and perspicacious. Although he examines a limited number of canonical texts in Enlightenment rhetorical theory, by shifting the frame of analysis from epistemology to economics, he succeeds in uncovering in those familiar texts many original and compelling insights. If there is any criticism one might offer, it is that, at times, the narrative is too neat and too economical. Longaker focuses so scrupulously on a progression of ideas that he sometimes neglects complicating issues that—on closer examination—may also turn out to be relevant. For example, he devotes little attention to the influence of the classical traditions of invention and argument on Enlightenment rhetoric. However, one can't help but be curious about how classical notions of scientific discovery and rhetorical advocacy were reconciled with Adam Smith's theory of economic growth in commercial society—which depends on the division of labor and specialization in the labor force (including both physical and intellectual labor). Although it may have distracted from Longaker's central interest by drawing us back to the more familiar grounds of rhetoric and epistemology, the tendency toward intellectual fragmentation—which undermines modern usage of the classical topoi—does seem to be important to any discussion of rhetorical pedagogy and bourgeois ethics. So, for instance, by ending his narrative with Spencer, Longaker overlooks other writers (John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Alexander Bain, and John Ruskin, for example) who were preoccupied with responding to Smith's division of labor because of its dangerously dehumanizing implications. The project of reframing public discourse—and specifically, of reframing public argument—in a way that would secure social justice as a constraining value to commercial culture became pervasive to nineteenth-century ethics and economics.Longaker's “rebranding” of Hugh Blair as a “moderate man” who “taught bourgeois virtue to offset the vice of luxury and to prevent the corruption of commerce” (98) is an intriguing claim. But for those of us who are accustomed to reading Blair's lectures against the backdrop of neo-classical rhetoric and eighteenth-century classical education, the argument is not entirely convincing. For example, dating at least to Charles Rollin's The Ancient History (1729), Greek history had been a stage for attacking the commercial decadence of Athenian “popular culture” and for defending an elite “high culture.” Blair's disdain for disputation and for popular oratory and his endorsement of polite belles lettres reenacted a standard trope in eighteenth-century debates about class and economic stratification. Longaker's interpretation of Blair might be more convincing had he acknowledged this historical context—or at least provided greater attention to the way Blair's notion of belles lettres would be mobilized as a class marker.Finally, it is surprising that Longaker grants Richard Whately only a brief reference in his text. Whately was, after all, a major force in nineteenth-century British interpretation of rhetoric and of political economy. A prolific writer, he offered commentary on diverse subjects that seem directly relevant to the question of bourgeois virtue: tolerance and partisanship, charity and covetousness, luxury, argumentative clarity and consistency, humility and moral judgment, and the relationship between reason and passion in persuasive discourse. Granted, any careful examination of Whately on rhetoric, economics, and ethics, would easily fill a book by itself. Still, one suspects that by adding someone like Whately to this discussion the project might have gained an extra level of depth and nuance.Despite these minor disappointments, the bottom line is that Longaker's work stands as essential reading for anyone who is interested in the relationship between rhetoric and economics. In fact, for all of us who face the prospect of spending the remainder of our careers responding to the consequences of a collective investment in Trumpean economics—and at a time in which the Supreme Court has declared that “money is speech”—Longaker's analysis gives us ample motivation to rethink our assumptions about the relevance of Enlightenment rhetorical theory to our twenty-first-century predicament. John Locke, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Herbert Spencer each grappled with moral problems that are surprisingly similar to problems we face today. Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue may not provide a comprehensive study of the subject, but it is an impressive point of entry that is likely to inspire compelling research for the future.

ABSTRACTAt the End of the World there is blackness doing the (im)possible. This essay considers the (im)possibility of debate in our contemporary crisis through an examination of the domestication of potentiality in rhetorical dialectic. Debate, in its presupposition of stasis, parallels sovereignty's ontologizing operations of antiblack racial terror that suspend contingency. Meanwhile, blackness was already getting it done. The U.S. Civil War serves as a privileged example for thinking through blackness as the groundless constitutive outside to the possible that yet gestures toward other generative moments found in refusal of the disappointing options that pass for politics offered to us today.

Using data from 88 students, 20 advisers, and 24 hirers about U.S. résumés, this article focuses on face of the company, the concept of employers' evaluating how well applicants might represent a company. The results of applying rhetorical listening’s identification–disidentification to “face” suggested two outcomes and their implications. First, primary audiences invoked secondary audiences to the point in which they conflated, suggesting that résumés should incorporate secondary audiences. Second, hirers sometimes violated their own beliefs about diversity hiring because of audiences they invoked, suggesting that because invoking audience can perpetuate inequitable hiring practices, hirers should be more nuanced about the audiences they choose.

In this study, we examine how youth use media production to represent, (de)legitimate, and reimagine their experiences of hypercriminalization—the pervasive complex of social practices such as racial profiling that position young men of color as “always-already criminal.” We analyze two clips from a youth-produced news show called POPPYN, specifically a 2014 episode focusing on youth and the criminal justice system, using tools from recontextualization analysis and multimodal semiotics, which together allow us to index the substitutions, deletions, rearrangements, and additions of component elements of social practices. Through investigation of linguistic and multimodal processes that represent social actors, actions, and constructions of their legitimacy, this study demonstrates ways that media making can serve as a tool for youth of color to process and rewrite persistent hypercriminalizing positionings in more agentive and hopeful ways. We end by proposing implications for multimodal literacy practices and pedagogies.

Those of us who work at universities are accustomed to the way diversity and inclusion initiatives become institutionalized. Internal grant applications ask how the proposed research is relevant to a university's mission in relation to diversity; required online surveys are distributed to assure that faculty and staff understand accessibility guidelines; task forces, committees, and planning groups articulate goals related to diversity and inclusion. The application of these rhetorical acts in daily academic life undulates, sometimes visible and meaningful, other times fading into the scenery, becoming background to seemingly more pressing matters. We address these questions as they relate to scholarly publishing in rhetoric and composition journals, questions that affect editors and authors as well as those who teach and study in the field. As editorial team members of Composition Studies, a biannual independent print journal, we detail strategies for creating a home for diversity in our field.

Recent research in technical communication (TC) indicates that the field has become more varied than ever in terms of job titles, job skills, and levels of involvement in the design and production process. Here, we examine this diversity by detailing the results of a small-scale anonymous survey of individuals who are currently working as technical communicators (TCs). The purpose of our survey was to discover what job titles people who identify as TCs have held and the skills required of those positions. The study was conducted using the online survey platform Qualtrics. Survey results found that TCs occupy jobs and use skills that are often quite different from "traditional" TC careers. Results further support previous research that these roles and responsibilities continue to evolve. However, results also suggest that this evolution is more sweeping than previously realized---moving TCs away from not only the traditional technical writing role but also the "technical communicator" role as it has been understood for the past 20--25 years.

Drawing on narratives (Jones, 2016; Jones & Walton, 2018) from bilingual technical communication projects, this article makes a case for the importance of considering language access and accessibility in crafting and sharing digital research. Connecting conversations in disability studies and language diversity, the author emphasizes how an interdependent (Price, 2011; Price & Kerchbaum, 2016), intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989; Medina & Haas, 2018) orientation to access through disability studies and translation can help technical communication researchers to design and disseminate digital research that is accessible to audiences from various linguistic backgrounds and who also identify with various dis/abilities.

Technical communication scholarship is in the midst of a social justice movement with scholars interrogating considerations of race in technical professional communication (TCP) (Haas, 2012), revea...

This case examines how functionalist approaches manifest culturally based on users’ contexts. The authors conduct a critical visual semiotic analysis of the race and Hispanic origin questions on the 2010 U.S. Census form, demonstrating how incongruities in design potentially harm people. This demonstrates a need for adding critical analyses to design and research and it refocuses the Society for Technical Communication’s value of promoting the public good on to design and documentation in order to fight injustice.

Blood Sugar considers how metabolic syndrome is assembled and packaged to represent a medical category with cultural and racial consequences. In this text we find an unraveling of the chords woven ...

This essay presents the trajectory of a syllabus statement on linguistic and cultural pluralism and its role in the articulation and revision of a pedagogical approach that foregrounds students’ linguistic diversity and partnerships with local communities. In recounting the steps and stakeholders involved in crafting the statement, the author argues that this statement functions as an activist text. The author also contends that the field of composition studies should take on an activist agenda when it comes to language rights. Composition studies needs to go beyond merely accepting language pluralism to actively engaging and dismantling oppressive discourses and normative practices. By establishing explicit values and ideologies, the linguistic and cultural pluralism statement has the potential to promote and foster a culture of cross-cultural and global perspectives in the classroom through students’ ties to local communities.

Editors’ Note: With this interview, we inaugurate a regular feature of the journal focused on interviews and articles about community-based writing projects unaffiliated with higher education. Discovering the genesis, evolution, and meaningfulness of such projects illuminates theories and practices of writing as a potentially transformative social activity that fosters creativity, communication, equity, and justice. It broadens our understanding as researchers, teachers, writers, students, and community members about what, why, how, and to what end community-engaged writing provides a compelling ground for educational, social, cultural, and political dialogue, personal growth, and collective inquiry. We envisage rich descriptions and investigations of the phenomenon of the written word as a liberatory tool that helps realize individual potential and promotes democracy, equality, and inclusiveness. We are delighted to begin this series with an interview with New York Writers Coalition Founder and Director Aaron Zimmerman. A former co-chair of the Board of Directors of Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA), Zimmerman has been leading creative writing workshops using the AWA method since 1997. He has an MA in creative writing from City College, where he has also taught creative writing. His novel By the Time You Finish This Book You Might Be Dead (Spuyten Duyvil) was selected in 2003 by Poets and Writers as “new and noteworthy.” His fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The Brooklyn Rail, Georgetown Review, South Dakota Review, Jeopardy, and Mid-America Poetry Review.

Numerous studies have examined the relationship between lexical features of students’ compositions and judgements of text quality. However, the degree to which teachers’ judgements are influenced by the quality of vocabulary in students’ essays with regard to their assessment of other textual characteristics is relatively unexplored. This experimental study investigates the influence of lexical features on teachers’ judgements of English as a second language (ESL) argumentative essays. Using analytic and holistic rating scales, English pre-service teachers (N = 37) in Switzerland assessed four essays of different proficiency levels in which the levels of lexical diversity and sophistication had been experimentally varied. Coh-Metrix software was used to manipulate the level of lexical diversity, as measured by MTLD and D, and the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (TAALES) software was used to obtain differing levels of lexical sophistication, as measured by word range. The results suggested that texts with greater lexical diversity and sophistication were assessed more positively concerning their overall quality as well as the analytic criteria ‘grammar’ and ‘frame of essay’. The implications of this study for classroom practice and teacher education are discussed.

Background: Disparity of attainment between different groups of students in UK higher education has been correlated with ethnicity (UUK & NUS, 2019). For example, students who declared their ethnicity as Black were 20% less likely to graduate with a top classification than those who declared their ethnicity as White (OfS, 2018a). The causes of such attainment gaps are complex, and one important factor may be the nature of the feedback given by academic staff on assignments written by different groups of students. This paper aims to explore the feasibility of investigating this hypothesis by analyzing written feedback and looking for patterns in feedback given to different groups of students. Literature Review: Research on attainment among Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students in the UK has explored a number of aspects, and has generally concluded that there are issues of “belonging” (Richardson, 2015), particularly in institutions where the majority of academic staff and students are White, but that no single variable can explain the disparity. The wording of feedback on lower-scoring papers has been shown to be more impersonal and distant than that given to students on higher-scoring papers (e.g., Gardner, 2004), which has the (unintended) result of increasing the sense of belonging of higher performing students in ways that can build incrementally over the years of a degree course. While there have been many such small-scale studies of written feedback, none have aimed to collect large quantities of authentic written feedback for analysis. Research Questions: The hypotheses that drive our exploration are that written feedback information (WFI) (Boud & Malloy, 2013) is worded differently to different groups of students, and that there is a direct relationship between this aspect of feedback and academic attainment as measured by grades on summative assessments. Specifically, we asked: 1. Can a framework of WFI functions be developed for our data that share a meaningful set of attributes? 2. Can these categories be used to differentiate WFI to different groups of students? Methodology: A small pilot corpus was compiled from written feedback comments on twelve student assignments from two large Faculties. Metadata was added to each file, and the WFI comments were annotated and analyzed according to a framework developed in a branching format through a recursive construction process informed by the literature reviewed and the data in the corpus. This technique was used to characterize the WFI styles of the two Faculties. Results: The results show that all WFI comments could be classified using the novel systematic framework developed, and that its binary nature enabled ready cross-tabulation with metadata variables. Praise and critique were found to be most frequent, with specific praise of ideas (P1A) accounting for 68% of all praise, and specific critique of content (C1A) accounting for 49% of all critique. Observations tend to be the longest feedback comments (average 15.4 words). When the two Faculties are compared, two different feedback styles are evident, with Fac1 providing more advice, query, and observation style feedback than Fac2, and Fac2 providing more praise and critique than Fac1.

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

As a discipline and a set of practices, technical communication focuses on designing technical products through the effective implementation of usability to facilitate users in performing tasks with speed, accuracy, and satisfaction. This article proposes that designers in the Global North should consider the effective localization usability implementation in their products or systems so that social justice can be promoted in the Global South’s countries that import such products from the Global North. Using a purposeful sampling research method, this article shares findings from a study, emphasizing that technical products developed through participatory localization for usability might be in a better position to be used for promoting social justice and human rights in resource-constrained settings. The article discusses the implications of the findings, suggesting that northern products should be designed according to the usability expectations of local users in the Global South so that the North–South divide can be, at least, narrowed, if not eliminated.

This article examines the importance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rhetorical approaches in professional communication theory, introducing the theory of working closets as central to understanding how LGBT professionals navigate and succeed. The author presents case studies of LGBT professionals at the headquarters of a national discount retail company as examples of working closets and asks what the implications are for professional communication studies. He also looks at the need to learn from and through queer rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, and social justice frameworks, especially given the cultural turn of professional communication studies in the early 21st century.

Writing centers are at once a part ofand a response tothe neoliberal academy, a phenomenon that Ryan King-White describes as a place where, “students have come to be regarded as customers, academic researchers are thought of as entrepreneurs competing for external grant funding, and the university itself more closely resembles a business model than an institute of higher learning” (223). Using that as a starting point, this essay functions part historiography, part diagnosis, and part synthesis, with three main goals: (1) redefine “neoliberalism” as a framework of critique for contemporary higher education within the United States, (2) diagnose writing centers situatedness within the neoliberal academy, and finally, (3) identify how emergent social justice scholarship—here defined as those theories accounting for access and ability, anti-racism, braver space, mindfulness, and labor—within Writing Center Studies are particularly suited as responses to neoliberalism. By expanding disciplinary praxes to examine how writing centers function within the neoliberal academy to incorporate a broader range of identities, theories, and people, writing centers can be better equipped to identify the reifying practices of our centers and develop ways to resist the harmful effects of neoliberalism that evoke these responses.

The IWCA Special Interest Group (SIG) on Antiracism Activism “is a group committed to undoing racism at multiple levels: in the immediate context of the writing conference and local writing center, and more widely through systematic cross-curricular and cross-institutional initiatives” (“WCActivism”). This piece features the SIG’s participation in the 2018 online IWCA Collaborative at CCCC: the SIG leaders assembled a diverse panel of scholars and practitioners from different races, ages, institutions, and varying levels and types of writing center experience, but with useful and firm beliefs in action. Using Rasha Diab et al.’s 2013 article “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable” as a starting point, the panelists drew on their various perspectives to examine the potential for and barriers to actionable antiracism activism within both the writing center and the IWCA. The authors reflect on antiracism action in, through, and by writing centers and those who work in them, situated within writing centers’ local, academic, and institutional contexts.

Abstract The article describes the process that four writing center consultants took to design and implement an antiracist workshop at the Oklahoma State University Writing Center (OSUWC). Using antiracist pedagogy, feminist invitational rhetoric, and inclusive writing center pedagogy, this essay documents the creation of an antiracist workshop designed for writing center staff and consultants, our presentation of the workshop at the South Central Writing Centers Association conference, the revision process, and training of writing center staff at the OSUWC. Rather than outline a one-size-fits-all workshop, this article provides a framework for addressing racism with reflexive, context-based resources.

This article investigates my lived experience as a black queer writing center tutor for the purposes of theorizing the transformative power of learning centers. Drawing on several perspectives and methods offered in Praxis ’s special issue on Access and Equity in Graduate Writing Support , this article argues that the antiracist potential of writing centers depends on more comprehensive analyses of how writing centers function as racialized places. Using the metaphor of the “academic ghetto,” I signify on the misconception of writing centers as places for correcting deficiency. I apply my analysis to both an Undergraduate Writing Center (WCs) and a Graduate Writing Center (GWC) space to systematically discover how racial biases mediate and construct these learning spaces. In particular, I structure my discussion through a blend of personal narrative and critical analysis that illustrates the epistemic conflict and character of the “academic ghetto.” The article concludes with a call to invent antiracist practices for writing centers that model more inclusive methods of living in these spaces.

Abstract Why do conversations regarding students’ right to their own language and antiracism in the writing center still invite insults and agitation? After all, these struggles for students’ rights to self-determination and their own language in composition are far from new. The narratives present within this writing move beyond mere analysis of how and why established institutions attempt to control, and, rather, put Laura Micciche’s theories of emotion and performance to the test. When teaching tutor training, readings regarding students' right to their own language and race potentially cause conflict and can, at least at first, elicit strong emotional responses. This article explores the value of such early emotional reactions to these readings. Can the tutors’ emotional performances, both in action and voice, eventually help to bring attention to, or subvert the backlash and attacks antiracism rhetoric tends to invite? Within its pages, Micciche’s Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching suggests that we perform emotional appeals rather than simply make them. Through performance, she claims, we present emotion, not as something that resides in people to be shared or withheld, but as encounters between people. This article’s narrative “reenactments,” then, are set to reveal the fears and desires behind the resistance I’ve both witnessed and encountered all while promoting what I deem to be a necessity for emotional performance in antiracism and writing center work.

African American rhetorics and knowledges can be understood through a rhetorical method that is concerned with what circulates as Black, but is not limited to Black bodies, while avoiding becoming mired in the quicksand of authenticity. (27) —Vorris Nunley, Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric

Ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region comprises a vast area among three continents-Europe, Asia, and Africa. While there are no standardized lists of MENA countries, the following countries and terri-

96 RHETORICA I take issue with Mifsud's verdict that Aristotle sacrifices Homer is that, if the project is to "excavate the gift in rhetoric and rhetoric in the gift, [in order to] discover resources for resisting tyranny" (p. 11), then it seems ill-advised to make doxa responsible for the loss of the magic inherent in the gift. Indeed, at the 2016 NCA event several panelists focused their commentaries on doxa as the gift of inherited stories, transmitted through generations. Stories circu­ late through private as well as public networks; they are the gifts of rhetorically constituted social formations. Aristotle's doxa of prudential rhetoric do in fact have the capacity to resist tyranny, as the history of the polis shows. That tyr­ anny sometimes wins is hardly proof to the contrary. In gifting theory, a sacrifice is a gift with no obligation or debt. In Mifsud's portrayal, Homer is almost Christ-like insofar as he gives to Aris­ totle without expectation of return. Mifsud pursues an ostensibly prescrip­ tive analysis of what the gift ought to be, never quite accounting for the move away from the gift as a logic of the relationship between poiesis and rhetoric. It is intriguing that the classical focus of Mifsud's investiga­ tion of the gift does not direct her toward history's most powerful caution­ ary tale regarding dangerous gifts. Virgil's fear of the Greeks bearing gifts is nowhere to be found in Rhetoric and the Gift, which obscures the possibil­ ity that even the gift left at the city gates may bring brutality long before the technical apparatus of rhetoric. (Those who attended the tribute panel will not soon forget John Poulakos's artful present to Mari Lee: a wooden horse with a retractable ribbon in its mouth bearing forty Greek words— one for each warrior hidden inside the Trojan gift—illustrating the continuity of Indo-European etymology.) Mifsud describes how Homer's "song-like speech is his well-recognized gift to the civic world" (p. 33). His call to Aristotle is "imaginative, inventive, and ingenious" (p. 33). In it, all manner of goods— hospitality, friendship, love (p. 86), honor (p. 103), and equity (p. 107)—maybe discovered. This view of gifting is irresistibly hopeful. To conclude, I submit that Mifsud's book is a masterful analysis of Homeric traces in the rhetorical tradition that continue to exert influence to this day. I would contend, how­ ever, that her reading of the gift, together with its implications for rhetoric, overlooks those aspects of gifting that are inflected with other rhetorical impul­ ses: fear, enmity, and coercion. E. Johanna Hartelius, University of Pittsburgh Silvia Gastaldi, Aristotele. Retorica, Introduzione, traduzione e commento, Roma, Carocci 2014 (ristampa 2017) ISBN: 9788843074198; Maria Fernanda Ferrini, [Aristotele]. Retorica ad Alessandro, Milano, Bompiani 2015. ISBN: 9788845279249 Nell'ampia messe di studi sulla retorica greca e latina prodotti negli ultimi decenni un posto di rilevo occupano senza dubbio quelli dedicati alie prime Technai rhetorikai consérvate, la Retorica di Aristotele e la Retorica ad Alessandro. Reviews 97 Per la collana Classici di Carocci Editore, Silvia Gastaldi ha curato una nuova edizione délia Retorica aristotélica, con testo greco, traduzione ita­ liana ed ampio commento. Nell'introduzione si legge che la Retorica aristo­ télica "sembra davvero collocarsi al crocevia tra un'impostazione teórica, finalizzata a riflettere sulle modalité attraverso cui si costruisce un discorso persuasivo, qualunque sia il suo ámbito di applicazione, e una prospettiva pragmática, che rinvia alie pratiche comunicative proprie délia città greca, e perciô legate alla realtà fattuale" (p. 14). La consapevolezza del duplice binario lungo il quale si muove Aristotele — quello délia descrizione empirica delle pratiche del discorso del mondo reale e quello délia teorizzazione di un modello scientifico di retorica filosófica - anima Lanalisi délia Gastaldi sia nelle pagine introduttive sia nel commento al testo. La studiosa non manca peraltro di sottolineare il debito dello Stagirita nei confronti délia tradizione retorica precedente, che aveva i suoi poli fondamentali nelLinsegnamento dei sofisti da un lato, nella riflessione platónica dall'altro (pp. 10-11). Il testo greco, come specificato in una Nota al testo...

Reviews Menegaldi in Ciceronis Rhetorica Glose, Edizione critica a cura di Filippo Bognini, Firenze, SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo 2015, pp. CLII-286. ISBN: 9788884505910 La prestigiosa collana di testi della Société Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino (SISMEL) si arricchisce di un nuovo volume, ossia il commento, finora inedito, al De inventione ciceroniano di Menegaldo, un commentatore attivo fra Luítimo scorcio del sec. XI e la prima metá del XII secolo. L'edizione è curata magistralmente, per rigore e per ampiezza di riferimenti utili anche a ulteriori ricerche e/o edizioni, da Filippo Bognini (d'ora in poi B.), un giovane ricercatore dell'Universitá Ca' Foscari di Vene­ zia, studioso della tradizione grammaticale e retorica medievale e umanistica (sua peraltro la recente edizione critica del Breviarium de dictamine di Alberico di Montecassino). La figura di Menegaldo (dai manoscritti risultano le diciture Menegaldus , Menegaudus, Manegaldus o Mainegaldus, d'ora in poi M.) si colloca a un punto di svolta nella storia della cultura scolastica, e in particolare della tradizione retorica del Basso Medioevo. Fra la seconda metà dell'XI e il XII secolo - quando le nuove esigenze della scena politica, del diritto e delle controversie teologiche fanno si che il dibattito pubblico e dottrinario trovi un più vivace contesto pratico di applicazione - si registra un forte impulso all'istruzione sistemática delle arti della scrittura (artes dictaminis o artes dictandi ) e in generale della retorica, impulso che comporta un rinnovato inter­ esse per il De inventione e la Rhetorica ad Herennium, entrambe ritenute auténticamente ciceroniane e rispettivamente note anche come Rhetorica Vêtus e Rhetorica Nova (sulla ricezione medievale della retorica ciceroniana il rinvio obbligato resta la messa a punto del volume, a cura di V. Cox e J. O. Ward, The Rhetoric of Cicero in its Medieval and Early Renaissance Com­ mentary Tradition, Leiden, Brill, 2006). Tale interesse trova adesso la sua principale espressione testuale nella forma delle glose: un apparato continuo di note a commento del senso e della lettera del testo, pubblicato - ben diversamente dalla mise en page Carolina del commento, caratterizzata da note a margine del testo e/o interlinean - su un supporto autonomo dal testo commentato ma formalmente collegato ad esso proprio dai "lemmi" costituiti dalle prime parole della frase o del parágrafo volta per volta presi in esame. Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 1, pp. 92-102. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541.© 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct aU requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press s Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www.ucpress. edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.L92. Reviews 93 Al nome di M. sono riconducibili una serie di commenti, alcuni perduti (fra gli altri un commento ai Salmi), altri pervenutici in maniera piú o meno cospicua (fra cui glosse alie Metamorfosi di Ovidio e all'Ars poética di Orazio). Secondo alcuni autorevoli studiosi questo autore potrebbe identificarsi con il polemista Manegoldo di Lautenbach, attivo nellXI secolo in area francotedesca come esponente del movimento noto come "riforma gregoriana". Pur sembrando a B. questa identificazione plausibile, a suo giudizio gli elementi finora raccolti sono insufficient! per esprimersi categóricamente in modo favorevole. Dalle indagini di B. sul milieu di circolazione delle opere di M. e da un accurato esame delle fonti del testo édito, comunque, emerge il profilo intellettuale di un autore di area non italiana, gravitante in area franco-tedesca, buon conoscitore del canone degli autori classici (in particolare Sallustio, Virgilio, Lucano, Terenzio, Orazio e Ovidio), che leggeva Cicerone verosímilmente per un capitolo di canonici, attualizzando il testo con esempi pratici legati alia loro vita quotidiana. Al di la delle questioni biografiche - sulle quali il lavoro di B. fomisce comunque un rilevante contributo - per la ricostruzione della tradizione reto­ rica (e scolastica) medievale conta di piú il fatto che M. rappresenta uno dei piú illustri esponenti di una dotta e impegnata schiera di commentatores, capace di rinnovare la tradizione esegetica dei testi degli auctores classici, awalendosi in particolare della forma-commento, continua e lemmatica, delle glose. Per quanto riguarda...

The theme of this special issue is Post-truth. No doubt it was my exasperation with the terminological state of our collective situation that incited me in the spring of 2017 to settle upon it. What, exactly, does the hyphenated couplet mean or to what does it refer? What is its significance or sense? How is it being used, by whom, for what purpose, and with what consequences—for whom? And if, as was being asserted on nearly every side, we currently find ourselves in post-truth, how might we ever get out, presuming we may one day want as much? The original contributions by Sarah Burgess, James Crosswhite, Jason David Myres, Bradford Vivian, and Eric King Watts published herein go a long way toward answering these questions. In the pages that follow, readers will encounter five different takes on what post-truth is: a dangerously normative scene of address, a contemporary communicative environment and a series of historical philosophical movements, the discourse of the masculine hysteric, an insidious mode of governance, racism's latest word. Readers also will happen upon five different estimations of post-truth's (ab)uses and effects: the depoliticization of #MeToo, babble and echo chamber, the impotence of truth, the rationalization of authoritarian impulses and the death of democracy, and zombie relations and tribal war. As for an exodus, over the course of these pages readers will be gifted words that trace an open: kairos, apophasis, desire, pluralistic deliberation, and ideological critique.For all their significant differences—both substantive and stylistic—there is, however, at least one point on which all of the issue's contributions converge: today we do not suffer a shortfall of truth. Quite to the contrary, we are witness to its excess(es), enabled by a circuitous slippage between facts or alt-facts, knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth. Indeed, few to none today openly profess a brazen and callous disregard of truth; instead, truth tellers all! In view of that fact, I will use the remaining pages of this introduction to briefly develop a thesis and deliver a wager. Thesis: post-truth is a distinct regime of truth singularly suited to late neoliberal governance. Wager: Derrida's deconstruction of the philosopheme truth offers invaluable instruction in the possible undoing of the post-truth regime.“Each society,” Michel Foucault famously noticed, “has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth” (1994, 131). I submit that post-truth is the name for a distinct mutation in the “‘political economy’ of truth” in the United States that has been in the making at least since the 1980s, a crucial decade during which neoliberalism began to function as a normative order of reason in public, private, and personal life. Now with other modern regimes of truth, it seems to me, post-truth shares four of five “important traits” to which Foucault attributes their truth effects: “Truth” is subject to constant economic and political incitement (the demand for [it], as much for economic production as for political power); it is the object, under diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption (circulating through apparatuses of education and information whose extent is relatively broad in the social body, notwithstanding certain strict limitations); it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media); finally, it is the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation (“ideological” struggles). (1984, 131) To wit, post-truth as cash cow for print and electronic media and fodder for year-around political campaigning and fund-raising; English Dictionary 2016 Word of the Year; interminable open- and closed-door House and Senate hearings on Russian interference in U.S. elections; the internet, Ken Ham's Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, Breitbart, and the presidential bully pulpit; the birther movement, deep state conspiracy theory, global warming and New Creationism debates, and free speech controversies on university campuses across the country.But there is, according to Foucault, a fifth feature of all modern truth regimes that is conspicuously missing from post-truth. Whereas in all the others “‘[t]ruth’ is centered on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions that produce it” (1984, 130), in the post-truth regime, the form of scientific discourse is displaced by a discourse very different in form and in kind. Of course, what sets scientific discourse or truth claims formally apart from other modes of address is, above all else, the disappearance of the enunciative subject as well as the universalization of its audience. In other words, there is a clear correlation between the value of any scientific claim to truth and the erasure of any and all traces of the “I,” on both ends of the exchange. Not incidentally, that is not the case in the post-truth regime wherein truth value pivots on the degree to which any claim or utterance comports or resonates with individuals' affectively imbued investments, attachments, and identifications. Per the Cambridge English Dictionary, post-truth is “an adjective relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” According to the Economist, post-truths are “assertions that ‘feel true’ but have no basis in fact” (2016). The point is amplified by C. G. Prado in the introduction to his edited collection of essays titled America's Post-truth Phenomenon: When Feelings and Opinions Trump Facts and Evidence: Post-truth is the final step in the misguided move away from objective truth to relativization of truth. If truth is objective, assertions or propositions are true depending on how things are. If truth is relative, assertions or propositions are true depending on how people take things to be. Post-truth is an extreme form of relative truth because in being subjective, it makes assertions or propositions true depending only on how individuals take things to be. (2018, 2) For the time being I wish to defer the complicated issue of the “relativization of truth” in the declared interest of not being distracted from two others. That truth has been individualized or that individuals have become, to borrow a turn of phrase from Foucault, the primary and principal points of the production, application, and adjudication of truth is one important point. That emotion and personal belief are able now to outflank even objective facts and scientific knowledge is another (the claim that literature, for example, has truths to tell has long fallen on deaf ears). Their articulation is decisive: with the regime's inflection, even inflation, of the indefinitely pluralized and individualized enunciative I who, by virtue of strong feeling, is able at any moment not only to recognize or know but, also, to tell or speak the truth, truth is privatized and immanitized, its universal and transcendental dimensions nullified altogether. Hence, what is true for any one person need not be true for everyone or anyone else; what is true for anyone now need not necessarily be true later.This thinking about post-truth as a distinct and consequential mutation in the political economy of truth in the United States prepares one to appreciate an occurrence that easily could be dismissed as insignificant, not worthy of studied reflection. In June 2017 the Fox News network dropped its wildly successful marketing tagline “Fair and Balanced.” Now how is this anything more than a trivial change in—or, for consumers who never bought it, a long overdue giving up on—appearances? “A functional change in a sign-system is,” Gayatri Spivak explained some years ago, “a violent event. Even when it is perceived as ‘gradual,’ or ‘failed,’ or yet ‘reversing itself,’ the change itself can only be operated by the force of a crisis” (1987, 197). It is from this angle that the Fox News network's erasure of “Fair and Balanced” is grasped as indicative of a crisis that may be summarily described as the epistemic drift to post-truth. Telling, too, is the network's new motto, “Most Watched. Most Trusted.” The sequence of the two syntagms is curious in the least, as conventional wisdom would have them reversed for reason of causality: because Fox delivers trustworthy news, it is the most watched network. But that is not the case here: instead the motto reads, because Fox delivers the most watched news, it is (to be) trusted. Even more, conventional wisdom would suggest that when it comes to reporting the news, “most trusted [by its viewers]” (a verb) would be rephrased as “most trust-worthy [for any viewer]” (an adjective modifying the noun or the news content delivered). The movement from one marketing tagline, “Fair and Balanced” (even if only for the purpose of keeping up the appearance of disinterestedness), to the next, “Most Watched. Most Trusted,” intimates the usefulness of the post-truth regime to late neoliberal governance. It is to this relation that I now turn.Elsewhere and on more than one occasion I have written at relative length about late neoliberalism, aspiring to lend specificity to this overused and, all too often, undefined term that typically is asked to carry the considerable weight of an overdetermined context functioning as source, origin, or ground for some phenomenon in question. In the brief compass that is the special issue editor's introduction, a short and schematic summary of it will have to do.One, I follow Foucault's lead by using the term “neoliberalism” as the name for a distinct rationality and corresponding mode of governance that emerged during the second half of the twentieth century. At its most basic, I understand any rationality to be something like a mind-set or habit of thought in accordance to which persons of every sort make sense out of and conduct their daily lives, and I understand governance as the “conduct of [that] conduct,” “at a distance” and carried out by more than juridical means (Gordon 1991, 2). Despite its actually being a complex construction, neoliberalism feels natural or given by nature to those groomed in it. Like other modes of governance, neoliberalism's (soft) power to shape human activity is secured by a whole host of institutions, apparatuses, and knowledges.Now as Foucault explains in his 1979 lectures published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics, twentieth-century American neoliberalism as a rationality materializes as the effort “to use the market economy and the typical analyses of the market economy to decipher non-market relationships and phenomena which are not strictly and specifically economic but what we call social phenomena” (2008, 240). Even more specifically, then, neoliberalism is to be understood as a rationality inaugurated by a migration of economic sense making (for example, the calculus of profit and loss and the principle of laissez-faire) from the private or corporate sphere to the public sphere, from consumer relations in the strict sense to social relations in the general sense. Foucault delivers an illustrative example: In their analysis of human capital … the neo-liberals tried to explain, for example, how the mother-child relationship, concretely characterized by the time spent by the mother with the child, the quality of the care she gives, the affection she shows, the vigilance with which she follows its development, its education, and not only its scholastic but also its physical progress, the way in which she not only gives it food but also imparts a particular style to eating patterns, and the relationship she has with its eating, all constitute for the neo-liberals an investment which can be measured in time. And what will this investment constitute? It will constitute a human capital, the child's human capital, which will produce an income. What will this income be? It will be the child's salary when he or she becomes an adult. And what will the income be for the mother who made the investment? Well, the neo-liberals say, it will be a psychical income. (2008, 243–44) Summarily put, neoliberalism is a rationality that lends market sense even to so-called interpersonal relations and the micro-practices of everyday life.It is crucial to notice, however, that with neoliberalism also comes a determined and determining critique of the state. That is to say, whereas in nineteenth-century classical liberalism laissez-faire functioned as “a principle of government's self-limitation,” in post–World War II America “it is a principle turned against it” (2008, 247). Foucault elaborates: Faced with excessive governmental action, and in opposition to it, the nineteenth century sought to establish a sort of administrative jurisdiction that would enable the action of public authorities to be assessed in terms of right, whereas here we have a sort of economic that claims to action in strictly economic and market (2008, The of market analysis to is the the and, to this demand that the social be and and the of to the of from the to the and or altogether. It also is the rationality by which the of the and primary care is able to make sense. In the of the neoliberal of the state at out the with which it the and, of course, of human and individuals and private as the United she education for public education, personal and interminable for social for public of all for public and knowledge, for use for public is neoliberal of a certain of subject that is my second point. I follow Foucault in to be neoliberal primary the of the during the century and the I also take a is to say, as the primary point of of neoliberal governance. The name Foucault gives to that point of of power is of and the (2008, with to neoliberal governance, Foucault The subject is only as which does not mean that the whole subject is as In other words, the subject as does not an of any with economic It means that economic is the of one will on the of a new It also means that the becomes that power a on to the and only to the that he is That is to say, the of between the and the power on and the principle of the of power over the will be only this of of is the of and the But this does not mean that every every subject is an economic (2008, As Foucault explains in the series of is a subject of interest for the state only to the extent that its conduct is in market and Foucault points out that conduct takes in what he terms “an of on the one in the form of to a series of and, on the in the form of production, to the of or which his to the production of the of (2008, on the one to over which neoliberal have no and on the other “to the of will in their activity a an That is to say, in the market of and to upon laissez-faire makes itself as the by which individuals their and, in the Indeed, what Foucault as of the relationships of the social to the that is, the of neoliberalism is the historical of for also to function to in the care for The of course, is that as is by a in a situation Foucault with to the which happen to and with to the he for (2008, it is not to the neoliberal as but to the that virtue one of the of the neoliberal of the I use the term to a relatively but in I certain that in other and for example, in of in I will be to call late neoliberal and have their to here I to late twentieth-century neoliberalism's to and of in and the this of neoliberal governance, has the his of me that of has a general in how human and conduct in the century. As he it, very of who we of the we are and the of we have this I mean that the of the a of the of our point is to that but human has to as a the sense of the in the political but human now as a new of of in the political what is and in with this but human has been a in neoliberal political the and its terms of analysis have been to the of the has emerged the of the that is grasped at the but … in terms of its are understood less in terms of their of carried on a more in terms of a global economy of and the is a and with yet from a to the body, to be and this gives a in what of the for has the of the is and the is less about of the than it is about Hence, by I mean to point to a rationality that the or or by which or are made to and to others and those and, no by the of any social order or historical the social is for this point I the post-truth regime's with and usefulness to late neoliberal and governance is to the regime of truth whose is on the and of the enunciative I and whose is the and of truth a mode of governance whose primary is but whose primary point of of (soft) power is Indeed, at this point I might it this post-truth is the of has been asserted by more than one and on that it is to the of Foucault and or the and that we find ourselves in this we call post-truth. I one example, have the form of truth most today have no time for or and are to claims about relative other than to its form of truth is of and is in the of Michel Foucault and their from of truth, like Foucault and objective truth and truth to of truth was the in the in historical from modern to I it could be from the In fact, I will my introduction to this special issue to a with a that as a deconstruction will have something important to about how to post-truth well in of its Indeed, the been there from the in the thinking on the trace and the of the the universal of truth is also these the is to on is the It is the of the which is to say, the the not as a an and an as as the of would have it” but, instead, as by the trace of another which never as then, that is not to be grasped in the sense as on a but in the general sense as a of and made the case for in the general sense in and I the of to the the one the the the that is would not as the or opposition which gives them is the most significance of the to as the of the and functioning of an not by any would be the a in the of a trace the other as other in the no would do its and no would as the force of Derrida's is not against and for as Prado and others would have a of the of that classical will not the effort is to at the of both and be it with to or truth. and there is no of or truth the of or truth, even if all of the of or of truth are will also have been the point of Derrida's with a on the of to has this to about the of the and the the transcendental and the is not only the and to a truth whose would with all The or of being in a is no and in with it is the of As long as is or can not be in the … is not The and in this not the of possible in as that is the also is subject to even As The whole point of Derrida's analysis is the being determined and universal in an sense and are and not because are not but because the very of the universal sphere can only be in through like of this the to itself the possible to turn its the and the of the universal to relation that between truth and its also to the relation of and the and the given state of our In this particular historical the at is to against the to to the occasion of the of the in the of (the then, are five very different on the state of our post-truth as a the call to that any in our post-truth our thinking about it both and I want to all of the for their contributions to this issue and my deep to for his and of the

This essay looks into the interactions between an older African American couple as they negotiate literacy together. By considering the entwined writing trajectories of longtime life partners, the author highlights ways that “Chief” and “Shirley” demonstrate their ongoing desire for literacy in this moment of their lives; how the reading and writing practices of the more literate partner impact the less literate partner, and vice versa; and, what that engagement can tell composition researchers about writing development across the lifespan, particularly for an older couple in which one partner has become more literate later in life. Writing, like many life practices that Chief and Shirley share, indicates personal and practical commitment. Their example can help literacy researchers in Age Studies and Lifespan Development of Writing Studies understand the unconventional paths that writing development can take, not just for an individual but for a couple, and to see the value in viewing writing development as always emergent.

In this article, I propose Critical Race English Education (CREE) as a theoretical and pedagogical construct that tackles white supremacy and anti-black racism within English education and ELA classrooms. I employ autoethnography and counterstorytelling as methods that center my multiple identities and lived realities as I document my racialized and gendered experiences in relation to my journey to Ferguson, MO and my experiences as a secondary ELA teacher. The research questions guiding this study are the following: (1) As a Black male English educator and language and literacy scholar, how am I implicated in the struggle for racial justice and what does it mean for me to teach literacy in our present-day justice movement?; (2) How are Black lives mattering in ELA classrooms?; and, (3) How are we using Black youth life histories and experiences to inform our mindset, curriculum, and pedagogical practices in the classroom?This article explicates findings from three interconnected stories that work to show how CREE can be operationalized to better understand the #BlackLivesMatter movement in its historical and contemporary dimensions. The data analyzed stem from my autobiographical narratives,observations, social media artifacts, and images. I aim to expand English education to be more synergistically attuned to racial justice issues dealing with police brutality, the mass incarceration of Black people, and legacies of grassroots activism. This analysis suggests implications that aim to move the pedagogical practices around the intersections of anti-blackness and literacy from the margins to the center of discussion and praxis in ELA contexts.

This research aims to evaluate the impact of an inclusive writing approach, which strives to embed academic literacy into subject curriculum, an initiative that ran across schools at a UK-based post-1992 university in 2015-16. As an exploratory investigation, this research drew on a redesigned social science transitional module, where academic writing provision is closely in line with the subject content and assessments. This project explores student perceptions and experiences of the embedded writing provision and the extent to which the intervention contributed to student attainment. Data were drawn from focus group discussions, where 41 students participated, and from student grades for the comparison of attainment rates across 2014-15 and 2015-16. The focus groups were analysed using NVivo 11 to identify key themes in relation to student views of the embedded academic literacy provision. Student grades were explored using MS Excel for the relative progress across academic years. The findings reveal the positive impact of the provision on students’ attainment and confidence as learners and writers in higher education. This paper concludes with pedagogical implications and a discussion of potential areas for further research to investigate the diversification of support modes as to accommodate different learning styles of students.

In her position as both teacher and administrator in the late nineteenth century, Mary Church Terrell navigated the racism and sexism of an increasingly bureaucratic educational landscape to emerge as a powerful, activist voice for children. Through a closer look at the strategies she and others used to advocate for social uplift via children and the home, we can continue to uncover the uneven rhetorical terrain black women navigated as they advocated for youth within an environment that constructed black children as outside of normative conceptions of childhood.

This essay draws on letters, bulletins, photographs, and newspaper articles to give an account of the Hull House Settlement in Chicago in the 1890s and examines the rhetoric it engendered. The space of Hull House, I argue, communicated its founders’ Jane Addams’s and Ellen Gates Starr’s femininity, wealth, and knowledge of the wider world. Through an extended example of a garment workers’ labor meeting that took place in Hull House, I show how Hull House’s cosmopolitan aesthetic offered women and men from varying class, ethnic, and national backgrounds rhetorical resources for constructing ethos, and also provided constraints to communicating across differences.

This article dwells on the “I” who arrives in the university classroom by offering an earnest assessment of the vulnerabilities that one teacher-scholar of African American literature and culture brings with her into the classroom. Observations unfold by way of a critical, reflexive engagement with theories of haunting and Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, in order to account for some of the roots and routes, histories and inheritances, that call this I into being.

This article calls for recognition of ways in which feminisms have, do, and can inform social justice work in technical and professional communication (TPC)—even social justice work that is not explicitly feminist. The authors distill some areas of feminist TPC scholarship that are relevant to future social justice work: (a) epistemological contributions, ways of knowing and methods for discovering them and (b) reclamations of dominant topics, groundwork laid by feminist research on technology and science. They close with nine recommendations to inspire scholars with specific ways to use feminist methodologies and theories to enhance social justice scholarship.

This case study uses an action research approach to the implementation of a systematic bilingual writing assessment that K-5 teachers administered over a two-year period in an inner-city public school with a two-way bilingual English-Spanish program. The study reflects the importance of developing an awareness of academic discourse over time, as teachers participated in a writing assessment project that included the administration of writing prompts and corresponding analysis of student writing through use of grade level rubrics, three times each year. The instrument was developed by the first author, a participant-observer who in the role of writing coordinator also led professional development workshops, and provided mentorship to teacher participants. The second researcher is an outside expert on bilingual writing who participated in the retrospective interview stage of the study. This paper will focus on insights from semi-structured interviews with teachers that reveal their current views on aspects of the writing assessment project. The questions prompted teachers to review the rubrics and associated assessment materials to garner insights about their participation in the assessment project. Thematic analysis of the interviews indicates that teachers enhanced their awareness of discourse structure and the writing process, as they incorporated the rubrics for several pedagogical purposes: more targeted whole group instruction, strategic and flexible grouping of students, and more deliberate selection of topics to support writers during individual conferences. Furthermore, teachers appreciated the ability to systematically track writing growth across the academic year, an option that had formerly been used solely for documentation of reading development in this setting. The influence of standards in providing goals for instructional outcomes is also discussed. Changes in the form of assessment are unlikely to enhance equity unless we change the ways in which assessments are used: from sorting mechanisms to diagnostic supports; from external monitors of performance to locally generated tools for inquiring deeply into teaching and learning, (Darling- Hammond, 1994: 7)

Dominant stories and narratives are violent: They disregard and erase the humanity of so much of the world, with some of us emerging as the dis/figured and inept beings that can, and, apparently, should, be used; our bodies, our spirits, and our lives too easily made into the waste of the world. That making of humans into non-humans happens in all kinds of material ways and through a seemingly never-ending spate of cultural and political practices—colonial histories, immigration policies, labor practices, control of land, extermination—all of which are not just cultural and political, but instead are fundamentally and materially discursive. It is to this force of dominance that Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, intervenes. Advancing a decolonial rhetoric, Wanzer-Serrano takes rhetorical scholars to the complexities of violent narratives and the force of community resistance in his astute assessment of the New York Young Lords and their refusals to submit. His compelling account of the violent narratives surrounding Puerto Ricans makes this point quite clear: “Puerto Ricans were reduced in the popular imaginary and official histories to a caricature, a shell devoid of humanity, an image that was more a reflection of the attitudes of the colonizer than of the people themselves” (33).Given that dehumanized account, Wanzer-Serrano writes a book that asks and answers this compelling question: “Given a history of consciousness regarding Puerto Ricans that was … thoroughly racist and colonialist, how ought we proceed?” (33). Across the book, the answers he offers assess how Puerto Ricans wrote their own histories and futures. At the same time, his larger response, if not your imperative, is dual, and it is this: love and listen. To be fair, Wanzer-Serrano names the book’s primary intervention like this: I argue for a rethinking of democracy rooted in decolonial heterogeneities that keeps open the terrain for political contestation, features commitments to racial and gender justice, is guided more by liberation than by recognition, and empowers people to be engaged political subjects who exhibit epistemic disobedience by delinking from coloniality and rejecting neoliberal hegemonies. (27)Still, as I read through the book, it was love and listening that came together. Consider this frame of the project: “it is a commitment to finding ways to listen to others’ literal and metaphorical voices and to allow such listening to have its full, transformative effects on subjectivity” (127). That argument comes together most powerfully in chapter 4, where Wanzer-Serrano turns to the Young Lord’s “garbage offensive.” The garbage offensive, an instrumental move designed in part to simply clean the streets, became a much more comprehensive move, “a remarkable rhetoric about the decolonial ethos and ethics of [Puerto Ricans’] agency” (134). It’s here, in this analysis, that we can see listening and loving as ethics of both scholarship and activism, for what Wanzer-Serrano makes clear across the book is that the Young Lords intervened, made change, and reconstituted identity, politics, and community through their listening and loving.Wanzer-Serrano’s book raises numerous questions. What are the implications of the turn to decoloniality for scholars (like me) who remain pretty firmly centered in nation-states and race? And for rhetorical scholars more generally? How might we think de-linking outside of decoloniality? Can we? But perhaps the big question that this book raises is this: What would it mean for critical race rhetoricians to write within a love-and-listen framework? I see three critical mandates from this work for critical race rhetoricians. The first is that agency—so critical to Wanzer-Serrano’s project—has to be centered in much critical race rhetorical scholarship. As Wanzer-Serrano reminds us in the conclusion, this work teaches us much about the Young Lords but the bigger contribution lies in “what can be learned from the Young Lords” (167).In his emphasis on the voices, writings, and practices of the Young Lords and with his commitment to decoloniality, Wanzer-Serrano theorizes agency between the abstract and the concrete, always attentive to the histories, the people, and the locales. He advances a theory of rhetorical agency that we would do well to take up. What would it mean to rethink agency along the lines of what Wanzer-Serrano names “body-political modes of theorizing and acting in the world” (13)?If the first key mandate is a vigorous assessment of agency in critical race rhetorical work, a second lies in the discussions of the tensions between identity politics and politics that emerge out of identities. More specifically, Wanzer-Serrano’s project raises questions that we would do well to engage. What does it mean to build anti-essentialist identity politics? What are the other models of anti-essentialist identity politics? If we wanted to continue to theorize anti-essentialist identity politics, where would we begin? How do we make possible moments in which we name our identities, hold them, while also not being reduced to them or constrained by them? Here, Wanzer-Serrano’s turn to Kelly Oliver and response-ability is crucial, in part for the way response-ability, as Wanzer-Serrano argues, “generated the space where gendered subjectivity could become something, where subjectivity could begin to emerge as a set of practices oriented around an ethic of love built on witnessing to one another” (97). There is something in witnessing, something in stopping to see, to hear, to feel, that has potential.A final mandate of The New York Young Lords is the implicit call for more emphasis in our work on relationality. Certainly, relationality does not figure explicitly in the book as centrally as agency; still, it does drive the analysis. Here, I’m thinking relationality as informed by the work of Natalia Molina, in her argument for racial scripts; by that of Alexander Weiheyle, in his turn to racialized assemblages; and by Lisa Lowe, who reminds us that the many raced and colonial violences “are imbricated processes, not sequential events; they are ongoing and continuous in our contemporary moment, not temporally distinct nor as yet concluded” (7). What these folks make so clear is that we cannot think race, colonialism, dispossession, the nonhuman or less-than-human, in isolation. We cannot think just of the body, nor can we forget the body, nor just think here, but also there, not just in the moment, nor just in history.So how do we move forward? We write and think in spaces and voices of vulnerability and connection. This book—a first in our discipline—challenges all of us to attend to modernity and coloniality and our implication in it.

In his book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, Professor Darrel Wanzer-Serrano makes several important contributions to rhetorical, communication, and Latinx, race and ethnic studies, and social-movements scholarship. Among those contributions is his detailed historical study of the Young Lords as a social-movement group, which had been, until his study, barely (if at all) mentioned in communication literature. Additionally, his study of the Puerto Rican diaspora, specifically Nuyorican culture, identity, and politics within communication literature, is groundbreaking. And, his thorough, detailed, meticulous historical study of the Young Lords’ rhetoric provides a model of contemporary rhetorical scholarship that should be read and then modeled.The contribution I wish to focus on for this commentary is his theoretical contribution to rhetorical scholarship. Work within the field has studied colonialism through critiques of rhetorics of colonialism (Endres; Parameswaran; Stevens; Stuckey and Murphy) and empire (Abbott; Hartnett and Mercieca; Owen and Ehrenhaus; Perez; Pollini; Sandoval; Spurr), postcolonial critique (Dora; Hegde; Gajjala; Hasian; Jarratt; Kavoori; Kelly; Olson and Worsham; Parameswaran; Schwartz-DuPre; Shome; Wang), and neocolonial critique (Ayotte and Husain; Black; Buescher; Kuswa and Ayotte; McKinnon; Ono; Ranachan and Parmett; Rogers; Vats and Nishime) lenses. Moreover, critiques of colonialism have often been approached as what McKerrow calls “critiques of domination.”Wanzer-Serrano’s book offers a theory of rhetoric and decolonization, distinguished from postcolonial scholarship. Not only does Wanzer-Serrano offer a theory of decoloniality, but he also suggests that the Young Lords challenged decolonization in important ways. He argues, “In this book, I make the case that the New York Young Lords’ enactment of differential consciousness pushes the boundaries of decolonial theory. Through critical performances of border thinking, epistemic disobedience, and delinking, the Young Lords crafted a decolonial praxis that resisted ideological oversimplification and generated new possibilities and spaces for activism in their immediate contexts and beyond” (7).The main chapters of the book detail the history of the organization, its revolutionary nationalism, the role of women in the Young Lords, the organization’s neighborhood garbage campaign, and its campaign to reform the ideas and role of the church. A foundational book about Puerto Rican diasporic rhetoric, the book is attentive to historical nuance in its study of the New York Young Lords. It discusses their emergence and formation as a group, their political platform, their social work, and their decolonial orientation. Gaining expertise and knowledge about the Young Lords and Puerto Rican American rhetoric and culture in New York is a substantial undertaking, and the maturity and sophistication of Professor Wanzer-Serrano’s work is evident on the subject.Wanzer-Serrano comes to the study of the Young Lords as a “decolonial liberation movement” (149). He argues that “the Young Lords’ rhetoric of ‘the people’ embarks on an ‘ideologizing of ideology’ that reworked the people through a decolonial lens and for a decolonial function” (150). As part of their decolonial project, the Young Lords “delink from modernity/coloniality in theory and practice” (11). He captures the significance of delinking perhaps most poignantly in his discussion of the Young Lords’ church offensive, during which they occupied and took over the First Spanish Methodist Church and renamed it “The People’s Church.” There, he argues, “I try to enact and locate ‘an other thinking’ in their rhetoric—a delinking double critique functioning within both Anglo-American and Latin@ traditions and simultaneously ‘from neither of them,’ a critique ‘located at the border of coloniality’ that overcomes the ‘monotopic epistemology of modernity’ and ‘releases knowledges that have become subalternized’ by the coloniality in/of modern social imaginaries” (150). Building on the work of Bernadette Calafell and Michelle Holling, who develop the idea of Latin@ vernacular discourse, Wanzer Serrano adds his analysis that “a defining characteristic of decoloniality is a critical delinking that offers pluriversal alternatives to modern coloniality. Such alternatives can coalesce in challenges to ideographs like ‘the people’ but must also include broader epistemic shifts privileging geopolitical location and the body politics of knowledge in contradistinction to the dominant social imaginary” (164). Delinking from modernity also means delinking conceptually from liberal democracy, which he says “means turning toward a differential consciousness (a la Chela Sandoval) to map the connecting strands that can help us ‘change gears’ and envision a revised conception of democracy not dependent on a modern/colonial ethic of nonbeing’” (177). He advocates thinking of democracy as “fugitive—constantly in flight, marked by multiplicity, unbounded, and contingent.” In this way, he suggests, “Such openness, multiplicity, and constitutive antiracism provides a robust starting point from which to launch fugitive, democratic heterogeneities that can challenge homogenizing racial neoliberalism (177–178).Professor Wanzer-Serrano has made a significant contribution to scholarship through his book. His sophisticated discussions of theory and praxis, his bold move to challenge contemporary conceptions of coloniality, and his detailed case study, which (even without the theoretical framework) significantly adds to what we know about the important, yet understudied, social movement group called The Young Lords render this not only a book worth reading, but also one that becomes part of the canon of rhetorical studies, a hallmark of the best work rhetoric has to offer. This kind of contribution, once realized by others, will have longevity. In short, I would say that it is now not possible to talk about race, otherness, marginality, or power seriously in rhetorical studies without having to confront Wanzer-Serrano’s suggested optic of decoloniality.

“In the end, Luciano triumphantly asserted, ‘We’re building our own community. Don’t fuck with us. It’s as simple as that.’”—Wanzer-Serrano 131The epigraph—a quotation buried deep within chapter 4—belies the complexity and richness of Wanzer-Serrano’s project about the Young Lords and their rhetoric of “community control.” Although the quotation asserts a simple act of building community, Wanzer-Serrano’s book reveals how difficult it is to reimagine what community is and can be in light of colonial histories and a neoliberal present. Indeed, the concept of “community” is not without its difficulties. It can deny difference by positing togetherness as the ideal and often devalues temporal and spatial differences (Young 7). Yet, even as community is conceived differently, “radical theorists and activists appeal to an ideal of community” (Young 1). From a definition based in the neighborhood to one spanning borders, “community” carries connotations of race, ethnicity, nationality, and, importantly, identity. Narrated by Wanzer-Serrano to convey the affective force and empowerment-via-liberatory politics, the quotation in the headnote reminds the reader of community’s centrality to the Young Lords and their rhetoric but also to their imagining as a people. In this response, I tease out how the trope of “community” functions within the book as part of the discourse of community control. In doing so, I posit that Wanzer-Serrano’s work reveals tensions about community as it is negotiated within the politics of academia, our scholarship, and our relations to the communities we identify with and/or study.The meaning of the term “community” as it is used in the book reflects the tensions about the term. Wanzer-Serrano revels in and unpacks these tensions. Chapters 1 and 2 historicize the Puerto Rican community’s presence in the United States as Puerto Ricans reconcile their distance from the island and histories that led to their present conditions. Although Wanzer-Serrano is the scholar researching from outside, he provides the Young Lords equal positioning as experts to provide a perspective and account born of direct experience. Thus, chapter 1 is “both a history of the Young Lords and a history from the Young Lords” and elucidates a Puerto Rican history informed by the Young Lords’ concern with coloniality (Wanzer-Serrano 34). Chapter 2 attends to the Young Lords’ revolutionary nationalism delinked from coloniality and instead connected with decoloniality. These two chapters contextualize the various ideologies underpinning the Puerto Rican relationship with the dominant United States. In this account, the Puerto Rican community exists and asserts itself in the face of assimilationist discourses while it simultaneously carves out a space for the development of the Young Lords’ revolutionary politics. Although the Puerto Rican people were operating and surviving within the residual structures of community imposed by coloniality, Wanzer-Serrano elucidates how the Young Lords reimagine the possibilities of what a Puerto Rican people (and their community) can be and look like when situated in the mainland of empire and modernity.Chapters 3–5 reveal how an organization is reshaped by a decolonial ethic. Chapter 3 centers women’s voices within the Young Lords’ organization. Chapter 4 focuses on the neighborhood and their needs through the “garbage offensive.” Chapter 5 foregrounds the idea of a shared people—both the neighborhood and marginalized voices within it—through the church offensive. While he does not explicitly state it, Wanzer-Serrano implies that a decolonial ethic of love functions as an ideal mode of building and sustaining community with liberation and justice in mind. An ethic of love, informed by an intersectional “decolonial Third World protofeminist critique,” provides an avenue to reshape and re-form itself as needed to serve the community (Wanzer-Serrano 93). Decolonial love also functions to listen and respond to the needs of a community to address the coloniality’s commonplace oppression, as evidenced in the Young Lords’ “garbage offensive.” Finally, a decolonial orientation allows for a reconceptualization of “people” outside of the “hegemonic constructions of a liberal/Western people” and toward one of a “pluriversal collective, demanding material and epistemological liberation” (Wanzer-Serrano 146). If the people can be reimagined in this way, their community and its social relations with place and others can also be reimagined in a way delinked from coloniality.Wanzer-Serrano’s book reveals the very tensions of community and the multiple communities one identifies with, participates in, and is burdened by when traversing the spaces of academia, fieldwork, archive, and the neighborhood. Wanzer-Serrano’s critical self-reflections and revelations of positionality are peppered throughout the book but most evident in the introduction and conclusion. In a decade-long project spanning graduate-school experiences, Wanzer-Serrano’s initial theory building was first related to radical democratic theory, using the Young Lords as a case study. However, he later reoriented his project to focus on the Young Lords’ decolonial practice. In doing so and reflecting on this process, Wanzer-Serrano reveals the stakes of engaging in a decolonial project that requires a reexamination of one’s own epistemology, the education that led to it, and the scholarship that reinforces and circulates it. For Wanzer-Serrano, to build theory from the canon and to impose it on his subjects would inflict epistemic harm to his non-scholarly community in the name of solidifying one’s place within an academic community. Yet, to conceptualize a decolonial perspective in an ethical way requires time, energy, and commitment.Wanzer-Serrano’s book subtly reveals the stakes for academics of color and other marginalized communities. These scholars (myself included) often engage in research in these very communities and demonstrate the productive possibilities of theorizing from the ground up, not wholly disconnecting from the community in the name of securing “scholarly distance.” These academics identify with, and participate and live in, multiple communities, even as their work can serve and sever “community” in an effort to succeed within a neoliberal university model that is increasingly consumer-driven, instrumentally focused, and starved of community input. Yet, as the Young Lords illustrate, the rhetoric of “community control” foregrounds community as it operates from a decolonial orientation. Much in line with such scholars as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, and la paperson, Wanzer-Serrano illustrates decoloniality’s power and alludes to the possibilities of the university as a decolonial force. While all rhetorical scholars may not take a decolonial orientation, Wanzer-Serrano’s book beckons us to consider it and to weigh the stakes of not recognizing the world-making value and potential of it.