Quote of the Day

"I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement."

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

Using Writing to Fight Homophobia

LGBT Youth Writer's Worskhop

June 19-20, 9am-5pm

UTEP Union Plaza

500 W. University Ave.,

Contact: Department Chair Johnny Payne, Ph.D. @ (915) 747-5713

Spoken Word Featuring Dino Foxx & DJ Fresco

Open-mic poetry night so you can speak, listen and express your LGBT soul

June 20, 6pm-8pm

The Percolator

217 N. Stanton

El Paso Contact: Owner Bobby Smith @ (915) 351-4377

"Puentes LGBT Resources in collaboration with UTEP Creative Writing Department and The Percolator invite you to our LGBT Youth Writer's Workshop and Spoken Word event on Thursday and Friday June 19-20 as part of our programming for Frontera Pride Festival 2008.

The writer's workshop is free and designed for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth between the ages of 12-24 who wish to develop their creative writing skills in an environment free from anti-LGBT bias. Our presenters will be giving 8 exciting writing workshops for the attending youth."

Writer and historian Hector Carbajal will be presenting a workshop titled “The Metaphors of Empowerment: Writing as Resistance against Homo/Transphobia”. Queer youth will be encouraged to use writing as a form of resistance and empowerment against the injuries of homophobia along the border area.

Further Resources on Memory

I'm constantly looking for new sources about memory in research databases. However, the best places to find sources are within books published about memory. "Theories of Memory: A Reader" (Rossington and Whitehead, eds) is a great resource for further sources about memoria.

Some highlights:

Radstone, Susannah (ed.) (2000) Memory and Methodology. Oxford and New York: Berg.

Samuel, Raphael. (1999) Theatres of Memory, Vol 2: Island Stories: Unravelling Britain. London: Verso.

Scott, Ann. (1996) Real Events Revisited: Fantasy, Memory and Psychonalysis. London: Virago.

Warnock, Mary (1987) Memory. London and Boston: Faber.

I'll try to post more sources in the future.

If you would like to get a good foundation for rhetoric and memory, take a look at Rebecca Moore Howard's excellent bibliography.

Click here-> Memory: A Bibliography for Composition and Rhetoric

R.I.P. -- Tim Russert (1950-2008)

Rhetoric and Technology

"In the twenty-first century, it is necessary to think of rhetoric as the production and analysis of discourse--both spoken and written--and as the broad discourse of the comptuer that produces a mixture of images, sounds, and print in a rapidly developing new technology that has only begun to unfold. As the possibilities of communication continue to increase, our rhetorical concepts need also to expand. If our concepts begin to cramp our thinking and fail to fit around the expanding technology, time to then discard them like outdated clothes that no longer fit the growing child".

Winifred Bryan Horner, 2000

(Photo Courtesy of Texas Christian University)

Quote of the Day

"Memory, the art of committing the speech to memory by various mnemonic devices, and delivery, an art akin to acting, were essential to rhetoric as a spoken art. As the importance of the written word increased...the importance of memory and delivery as rhetorical disciplines diminished."

Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (New York: Harcourt, 1970),

Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike.

Memory Sources

The following are some noteworthy sources for those interested in creating a course on memory.

These sources are currently discussed in Susannah Radstone's recent article about the debates of memory's place within and outside academia in the first issue of Memory Studies.

Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 1992), John Bodnar

When Memory Speaks (New York: Knopf, 1998), Jill Ker Conway

Social Memory (Blackwell, 1992), James Fentress and Chris Wickham

Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space and Identity (Berg, 2000), Anne-Marie Fortier

"'The Memoir Problem'", Paula S. Fass in Reviews in American History 34(1): 107-23

Wulf Kansteiner's "Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies" in History and Theory 41(2): 179-97

The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, 2002), Avashai Margalit

Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (Columbia University Press, 1996), Pierre Nora.

Theories of Memory: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press), Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead

The Rossington and Whitehead anthology is luckily available here in the States. The most seminal of these sources is the Nora monograph.

R.I.P. -- Bo Diddley (1928-2008)

The Confluence of History and Memory in African American Culture

"On February 23, 1968, marking the hundredth anniversary of W. E. B. Du Bois' birth, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered one of his last major addresses at Carnegie Hall in New York City. In a year that would prove pivotal in African-American history, and that would bring such anguished events as King's own death, it is interesting and fitting to note how King chose to celebrate Du Bois' legacy. Above all, among Du Bois' scholarly and organizational achievements, King stressed his role as historian. Du Bois' "singular greatness," argued King, was his "unique zeal," which "rescued for all of us a heritage whose loss would have profoundly impoverished us."

King especially emphasized Du Bois' work on Reconstruction, a period traditional historians had for three generations portrayed as a tragic mistake in American race relations, an era when blacks, incapable of honest political behavior and self reliant economic activity, had been the principal cause of a sordid interlude in the progress of American history. King was no professional historian, but his own prophetic sense of history enabled him to grasp the social implications of historical understanding and debates. With all too much continuity, "the collective mind of America," declared King, "became poisoned with racism and stunted with myths."

Traditional historians' treatment of the black experience, the civil rights leader argued, "was a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history and the stakes were high." The question of the stakes involved in struggles over rival versions of history leads us not only to the political and social meanings of what historians do; it also provides an angle of understanding about the confluences of history and memory for intellectuals and for the larger society."

from "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for American Historical Memory" by David W. Blight in History and Memory in African-American Culture

Honoring Dr. Vicente Ximenes

Dr. Michelle Kells

At this year's RSA Conference, I was fortunate to present alongside Michelle Kells, Assistant Professor at the UNM Rhetoric and Writing Program. The title of her presentation was "Vicente Ximenes and LBJ's Great Society: The Rhetoric of Mexican American Civil Rights Reform".

Dr. Vicente Ximenes is the first Hispanic appointed US Commissioner of Equal Employment. In 1967, he worked with President Johnson as Chairman of the President's Cabinet Committee on Mexican American Affairs.

Dr. Ximenes


Dr. Kells and Dr. Ximenes

The title of our panel was "Rhetoricizing Latina/o Issues" and was moderated by the extraordinary David Zarefsky, who is the Owen L. Coon Professor of Argumentation and Debate, Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, former RSA President, and author of "Lincoln, Douglass, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate".

Dr. David Zarefsky

***

In 2006, Dr. Michelle Kells published Héctor P. García: Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights (Southern Illinois University Press). In 2004, she published and co-edited, with Victor Villanueva, Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity, and Literacy (Heinemann).



Dr. Kells' presentation on Vicente Ximenes at this year's RSA Conference and book about Hector P. Garcia prove that Mexican American/Hispanic rhetorics, alongside the rhetoric of civic discourse, continue to matter.

Photos courtesy of UNM, Sigma Tau Delta & Northwestern University