Arguments about literacy (and its boogeyman antonym, illiteracy) allow for, perhaps even insist upon, a certain degree of rhetorical flexibility. The idea of literacy slips into familiar commonplaces, hard to resist“or heard whether we mean them or not”in arguments with administrators, the public, our students, ourselves. Literacy’s trailing clouds include the sorts of promises that literacy scholars have learned to distrust, even as we’ve probably heard ourselves make them. None of the books in this review can sidestep these binds of literacy education, and in fact in their own ways, each of them embraces those binds as central to their analyses.

Between 1864 and 1869, the United States Congress debated an educational requirement for voter registration–a literacy test–as a means of dealing with the millions of new American citizens created by emancipation. These debates offer a critical early perspective on the development of literacy as a racial marker serving official racist agendas. Rhetoric supporting a test relied on the premise that a more literate and educated electorate is an obvious and uncontestable cultural good, necessary for the continued health and indeed survival of the nation. When the test was first discussed, its primary advantage was that it offered a way to talk about the inferiority of the newly emancipated Southerners without resorting to racial explanations; thus, freed slaves were dangerous not because they were black but because they were ignorant and uneducated. The 1869 debates about the Fifteenth Amendment, however, reveal a growing awareness of literacy’s rhetorical utility and the ways a belief in its inherent “goodness” might be used for ends divorced from the measurement or promotion of literacy: Radical Republicans proposed including a ban on such requirements in the language of the Fifteenth Amendment, certain that Southern whites would use it as a tool of disfranchisement. These debates, in the context of the test’s subsequent history as a tool of racist exclusion, demonstrate the rhetorical power and pliability of the idea of literacy within official policy.

This essay argues that by expanding our conception of a “literacy act” to include the denial of literacy, it is possible to gain a greater understanding into how the politics of literacy are enacted both historically and in the current moment.

The following email conversation, much of it done in a coffee shop in Amherst, Massachusetts across a table from each other, contains two strands that quickly merge into one. We’ve reproduced the beginning of each strand. We each sent an initial email (before either of us had read the other’s posting) and responded to them. Strand one starts with Lauren’s first posting and Kirk’s response to it, strand two with Kirk’s first posting and Lauren’s response. Following that, somewhat chaotically, we’ve included postings, which take up various themes. Readers will see where they merge, and where threads get picked up (or dropped).

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Review Article| January 01 2001 Knowing Your Audience and the Limits of Critique Kirk Branch Kirk Branch Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2001) 1 (1): 215–224. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-215 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kirk Branch; Knowing Your Audience and the Limits of Critique. Pedagogy 1 January 2001; 1 (1): 215–224. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-215 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2001 Duke University Press2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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