In our introduction to this special issue on cultural rhetorics, we as editors recognize that members of the field maintain many different approaches and frameworks. This diversity suggests that the work of prioritizing emplaced stories over universalizing theories brings cultural rhetoricians together, making research and teaching accountable first to communities, rather than the academy, and continuously examining our ethical commitments to O/others. This work, then, requires that scholars situate themselves within networks of places and spaces, cultures and peoples, power and privilege, so that we may practice relationality and accountability, actively seeking to make meaningful connections within and across research sites, and create space for silenced voices while building a more just world and disciplinary community.

This article foregrounds stories told by Kiowa Elder Dorothy Whitehorse DeLaune in order to distinguish “community listening” from “rhetorical listening” and decolonize community writing. Dorothy’s stories demonstrate “transrhetoricity” as rhetorical practices that move across time and space to activate relationships between peoples and places through collaborative meaning making. Story moves historic legacies into the present despite suppression enacted by settler colonialism, and story yields adaptive meanings and cultural renewal. When communities listen across difference, stories enact resistance by building a larger community of storytellers, defying divisive settler colonialist inscriptions, and reinscribing Indigenous peoples and their epistemologies across the landscapes they historically inhabit.

Meta G. CarstarphenFigure 1: Screenshot of YouTube video depicting an image of Obama grinning with a gold dental grill and gold chain necklace (Downs).University of OklahomaKathleen E. WelchUnivers...

Through an examination of archival texts produced at sites of suppressed local rhetorics, this essay situates Oklahoma as a location of writing at the intersection of ecocomposition theory, critical regionalism, and composition pedagogy to establish the need for using local texts and transrhetorical analysis in writing classrooms.