New in Books

Synopsis:

"Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911 examines the work of five female teachers who challenged gendered and cultural expectations to create teaching practices that met the civic and cultural needs of their students.

The volume analyzes Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedmen’s Book, a post–Civil War educational textbook for newly freed slaves; Zitkala Ša’s autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 that questioned the work of off-reservation boarding schools for Native American students; and Jovita Idar, Marta Peña, and Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s contributions to the Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica in 1910 and 1911—contributions that offered language and cultural instruction their readers could not receive in Texas public schools.

Author Jessica Enoch explores the possibilities and limitations of rhetorical education by focusing on the challenges that Child, Zitkala Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas made to dominant educational practices. Each of these teachers transformed their seemingly apolitical occupation into a site of resistance, revising debilitating educational methods to advance culture-based and politicized teachings that empowered their students to rise above their subjugated positions.

Refiguring Rhetorical Education considers how race, culture, power, and language are both implicit and explicit in discussions of rhetorical education for marginalized students and includes six major tenets to guide present-day pedagogies for civic engagement."

Tribute: Gloria E. Anzaldua

"Anzaldua's discourse embodies a set of proofs that transcends dualisms by embracing multiple understandings." 

Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford

Memory in Latin America

For some time, I have wanted to bring attention to the work of Elena Poniatowska, whose work belongs in our discipline. A critical article for rhetoric scholars and memory scholars alike is Poniatowska's "Memory and Identity: Some Historical-Cultural Notes" (in Latin American Perspectives, 19.3, Summer 1992, 67-78). One of her major scholarly and visual inquires continues being "Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution". More sources on memory in Latin American studies coming soon. 

African American Reform Rhetoric

"Frances Ellen Watkins Harper:  African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern Nation State" (Forthcoming: Spring 2009)

Michael Stancliff

"A prominent early feminist, abolitionist, and civil rights advocate, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote and spoke across genres and reform platforms during the turbulent second half of the nineteenth century. Her invention of a new commonplace language of moral character drew on the persuasive and didactic motifs of the previous decades of African-American reform politics, but far exceeded her predecessors in crafting lessons of rhetoric for women. Focusing on the way in which Harper brought her readers a critical training for the rhetorical action of a life commitment to social reform, this book reconsiders her practice as explicitly and primarily a project of teaching. This study also places Harper's work firmly in black-nationalist lineages from which she is routinely excluded, establishes Harper as an architect of a collective African-American identity that constitutes a political and theoretical bridge between early abolitionism and 20th-century civil rights activism, and contributes to the contemporary portrayal of Harper as an important theorist of African-American feminism whose radical egalitarian ethic has lasting relevance for civil rights and human rights workers." -- Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group)

New In Books

"The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," Annette Gordon-Reed