This issue both reflects and builds on the efforts prompted by the 2011 College English essay “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach,” by Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur. Contributions to this symposium contextualize the emergence of a translingual approach, explore the tension and interconnections between a translingual approach and a variety of fields, and explore the viability of a translingual approach in light of existing academic structures.

We argue that composition scholarship’s defenses of language differences in student writing reinforce dominant ideology’s spatial framework conceiving language difference as deviation from a norm of sameness. We argue instead for adopting a temporal-spatial framework defining difference as the norm of utterances, and defining languages, literacy practices, conventions, and contexts as always emergent, ongoing products of iterations, and thus manifestations of writer agency. Using the “White Shoes” essay from David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” we show how such a framework addresses the writer’s agency iterating the “same,” and how it resolves concerns to meet students’ need and right to learn both dominant and subordinate languages.

Arguing against the emphasis of traditional U.S. composition classes on linguistically homogeneous situations, the authors contend that this focus is at odds with actual language use today. They call for a translingual approach, which they define as seeing difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening.

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

When composition students look to their teachers for vocational guidance, both groups should acknowledge that the contexts of such terms as career, mobility, and skills have radically changed. In particular, the economy now links the global with the local, and capitalism has shifted from the fordist model, dominant through much of the twentieth century, to a newer, “fast” model.

Abstract Reviewed is Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms by Inderpal Grewal.

Keeping in mind the Chinese character-combination yuyan, with its multiple meanings of language, parts of language, the processes of language, and the products of those processes, the author depicts English as kept alive by many people and by many different ways of using it in a wide range of personal, social, and historical contexts. She proposes four lines of inquiry “against the grain” of English-only instruction—that living-English users weigh what English can do for them against what it has done to them; that they weigh what English can do against what it cannot do; that they understand English as being in the hands of all its users; and that they focus energy on how to tinker with the very standardized usages they are pressured to “imitate”—and discusses the implications of those lines of inquiry for composition in the United States.

This is an attempt to define what being a responsible and responsive user of English might mean in a world ordered by global capital, a world where all forms of intra- and international exchanges in all areas of life are increasingly under pressure to involve English. Turning to recent work in linguistics and education, I pose a set of alternative assumptions that might help us develop more responsible and responsive approaches to the relation between English and its users (both those labeled Native-Speaking, White or Middle Class, and those Othered by these labels), the language needs and purposes of individual users of English, and the relation between the work we do and the work done by users of English across the world. I argue that these assumptions can help us compose English against the grain of all systems and relations of injustice.

Deborah Brandt, Ellen Cushman, Anne Ruggles Gere, Anne Herrington, Richard E. Miller, Victor Villanueva, Min-Zhan Lu, Gesa Kirsch, The Politics of the Personal: Storying Our Lives against the Grain. Symposium Collective, College English, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Sep., 2001), pp. 41-62

This symposium presents a written dialogue of scholars expressing not only excitement but also frustration over the ways in which current work in composition and literacy studies has explored the politics of the personal.

In writing this paper, I have maintained that the actual act of writing is an important means for reflecting and revising the paradox of one’s privileges. It helps to put one’s self—especially one’s private and day to day thoughts, feelings, and bodily reactions—on the line for personal and public scrutiny.

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his essay explores the convergence we see between projects in ethnographic research and composition pedagogy that emphasize the critical power of experience.Though their aims are usually described differently, both ethnographers and composition teachers confront similar ethical issues of representing the populations they work with and the changes that may arise from that work.Both thus face the challenge of negotiating differences and power.The course of these negotiations, we argue, depends on what experience is taken to mean and how it can be used.Signs of this convergence between ethnography and composition pedagogy appear in both the shared ideals and the shared dilemmas reported in recent accounts and critiques of such projects.We have in mind those projects which attend to the politics of their research and teaching methods in pursuit of their commitment to socially emancipatory ends.Many ethnographers and teachers might see themselves as working for socially emancipatory ends (if defining these in different ways), and presumably all would be concerned with methodology.For us, however, critical ethnography and pedagogy approach methodology not strictly in terms of its efficiency in producing or transmitting knowledge to inform subsequent (social) practice but in terms of its effects as social practice.Critical ethnography and pedagogy thus reject the possibility of a politically neutral stance or practice before, during, and after contact between researchers and informants, or teachers and students.

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