College Composition & Communication - Volume 75, Issue 1, 2023

In “Our Story Begins Here” (2014) the CR Theory Lab offers key concepts related to cultural rhetorics such as constellating and relationality. Drawing from decolonial theory and practice, these concepts allow cultural rhetoricians to develop a scholarly practice that is reflective of the cultural community they are a part of and write for and to address the long histories and cultural practices of the land they dwell on. Where the CR Theory Lab is committed to a decolonial practice invested in the theories and lived experiences of the tribal nations people of Turtle Island, they also offer that it isn’t the only approach to cultural rhetorics. I argue that both scenarios reflect a larger political and cultural issue regarding how the occupied territories of Turtle Island (also known as the United States) don’t know what to do with tribal nations people, our fight for sovereignty, or our ongoing effort for cultural continuance. In other words, I will make an argument that maps how our discipline’s approach to decolonial theory, cultural rhetorics, and Indigenous rhetorics reflects the ongoing efforts of survivance and resurgence of Indigenous people.

Expanding conceptions of material cultural rhetorics in activism, I explore how amplifying autogestión by artist-activist collectives allows for an approach to allyship that contributes to changing material realities for those involved. Writing about artistic collectives that engage in autogestión amplifies projects calling out corrupt governing practices rooted in systems of oppression, while emphasizing and exercising the power of relying on each other. In this article, I reflect on how amplifying autogestión as cultural rhetoric in venues outside of the field expands the reach of cultural rhetorics and how bringing that work back to the writing classroom encourages interdisciplinary perspectives where students learn about their relationality and responsibility to Puerto Ricans and other colonized peoples within the United States.

Drawing upon original post-structural phenomenological research, this article explores how Jewish discourses are pathologized and marginalized in rhet/comp spaces in ways that impact theorizing, pedagogy, professional interaction, and disciplinary knowledge production and how the academy’s white Christian hegemony reifies itself through these processes. As the limited assimilative success of Jewish people demonstrates, inclusion is not inherently equitable, nor does it necessarily change the structures of white supremacy. Ultimately, I suggest that cultural rhetorics contributes a more critical conceptualization of “inclusion” for the academy that acknowledges the limitations and dangers of assimilation into whiteness.

In this article, we share and reflect on our experience working together (as a Native youth and settler scholar) to develop a cultural camp for tribal youth. Through reflection and storytelling, we came to realize the complexities of attempting to support what Scott Lyons terms “rhetorical sovereignty” (particularly of youth) in real institutional contexts, of appealing to different audiences without compromising our vision, and of determining where the line really is between “I” and “we” in our writing and our visions for this work. In short, we have come to realize how complicated justice-driven work really is and how the process has actually changed us both along the way. We use our own stories of collaboration and the program we designed to explore both the possibilities and complexities of allyship and collaboration across difference in our cultural rhetorics practice.

Composed in a series of letters, this essay explores the interdependent knowledge and survival work of crip communities. The authors discuss their experiences of myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME or ME/CFS) in a practice of Akemi Nishida’s “bed activism,” which challenges ableist demands for productivity from spaces of rest and care. Hsu and Nish ask what we lose—in intellectual and cultural growth and in actual lives—when academic spaces continue to devalue physical and cognitive difference. The resulting conversation considers illness as both an inevitability of lived experience and something exacerbated and ignored by academic spaces. It then explores how crip communities expand definitions of knowledge and knowledgemaking—offering wisdom that is not only valuable for a more inclusive profession but also necessary for a world increasingly sickened by extractive economies.

Drawing on disability studies analysis of institutional narratives of disability by composition and rhetoric scholars, this article theorizes “favor access.” Favor access gestures toward inclusion, but is steeped in the capitalist, colonialist logic of academic institutions in service of ultimately extractive, dehumanizing agendas. Instead of favor access, the article points to collective access as articulated by disability justice activists. As opposed to favor access, collective access rejects institutional logics and values community and collaboration rather than academia’s emphasis on individualism and competition. This article considers sites where collective access is happening in composition classrooms and in the field of composition and rhetoric.

This essay argues for attention in cultural rhetorics scholarship to stories as effective civic pedagogical tools informed by participatory knowledge-making practices. Drawing on a multiyear “mobile cinema democracy project” based on the physical circulation across Africa, Europe, and North America of a successful African democratic story told in the multi-award-winning documentary An African Election, I attend to both the documentary and its larger contextual project, “A Political Safari: An African Adventure in Democracy Building.” I demonstrate the ways that the African storytelling traditions of collaboration upon which this project rests offer us cultural rhetoricians key opportunities to reimagine inclusive knowledgemaking practices in using stories as civic pedagogies. My analysis reveals how such knowledge-making practices might orient our work against the grain of hierarchical, exclusionary, colonial practices and toward decolonial approaches that are truly participatory and inclusive.

Nancy Isenberg sums up fear of terms such as “white trash”: “‘white trash’ remind[s] us of one of the American nation’s uncomfortable truths: the poor are always with us.” Understanding culture as a narrative formation, which “means that it cannot be regarded as an isolated, or isolable, entity” (Lindquist 5), places “the poor” directly in relation to American academic culture. Sande Cohen’s true, yet much to be desired definition, “To say there is such a thing as ‘academic culture’ means that the processes of knowledge-production, socialization, labor distribution … and professionalization are in dispute,” provides backdrop for discussion. Specifically, “dispute” leaves room for stories that encourage discussions about cultural rhetorics, or “embodied practices of the scholar,” that connect “those who study it and those who live it,” beyond acknowledgment. The goal is to foster a learning environment in which students recognize that “becoming a responsible language user demands an understanding of the ways language inscribes difference” (Jarratt). Ultimately, I aim to highlight where and how discussing cultural rhetorics can reveal weak spots in educational institutions that are trying to diversify by connecting my cultural experiences as both “the poor” and someone within the institution.

In their report of the violences committed during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), the Commission for Historical Clarification stated that “historical memory, both individual and collective,” is important for creating just conditions and providing reparations to the victims of violence perpetrated during this armed conflict (1998, 48). As a result, remembrance projects began to create a memoria histórica that historicizes the violences committed by the Guatemalan government. These remembrance projects and memories often imagine a heteronormative Guatemalan populace and, in turn, erase the existence of queer and trans Maya people also affected by violence and ongoing genocide.

In this article I argue that the practice of Maya backstrap weaving is a rhetorical mechanism for remembrance and maintenance of traditional practices. Using a Two Spirit critique, I articulate a Maya-centered queer/trans rhetorical methodology that points to how Western historiographic methodologies continue to be the norm in Guatemalan historicizing practices, but also within WGSS, queer and trans studies, and rhetoric and writing studies. My use of backstrap weaving is a type of storytelling and remembrance practice that centers cultural rhetorics, Indigenous sovereignty, and locally specific Indigenous paradigms and frameworks to stop the erasure of Indigenous peoples from collective consciousness and canons.

Cultural rhetorics—as orientation, methodology, and practice—has made meaningful contributions to writing pedagogy (Brooks-Gillies et al.; Cedillo and Bratta; Baker-Bell; Cedillo et al.; Cobos et al.; Condon and Young; Powell). Despite these contributions, classroom teachers and writing program administrators can struggle to conceptualize assessment beyond bureaucratic practice and their role in assessment beyond standing in loco for the institution. To more fully realize the potential of cultural rhetorics in our classrooms and programs, the field needs assessment models that seek to uncover the counterstories of writing and meaning-making. Our work, at the intersections of queer rhetorics and writing assessment, provides a theoretical framework called Queer Validity Inquiry (QVI) that disrupts stock stories of success—a success that is always available to some at the expense of others. Through four diffractive lenses—failure, affectivity, identity, and materiality—QVI prompts us to determine what questions about student writers and their writing intrigue us, why we care about them, and whose interests are being served by those questions.

This article, based on an interview study with community changemakers working within hostile systems of higher education and legislative politics, builds upon scholarship that names and challenges normative time by offering a cultural rhetorics analysis of activists’ alternative, community-based temporal practices that are centered in relationships and prioritize participant needs over institutional mandates. We theorize community-based temporal practices based on the changemaking stories of our interview participants, especially moments when they encountered time-based obstacles and used community-based knowledges as workarounds. We constellate these stories about the material barriers of time, the way time is wielded by those in power, and how to prioritize relationships, thus illuminating temporal practices that can be used to challenge institutional systems.

This article examines how individuals experiencing incarceration inside jails and prisons use tenets of cultural rhetorics and digital literacies to reshape understandings about composition students and how they make knowledge to envision and practice freedom inside unconventional educational spaces. By primarily analyzing the prison podcast Ear Hustle, the author addresses how incarcerated people turn to podcasting not only to sharpen their composing skills but also to build literate communities inside demoralizing environments.