By: Cavar
“A Maddened rhetorical imagination, a Maddened literary imagination, and a Mad poetic imagination, are necessary to fighting sane hegemony. These imaginative practices, I have argued, not only allow us to see and believe in the lived realities we have been taught to call ‘not yet,’ but also to discern in them practices of resistance usable here and now.”
by: Alexander Slotkin
“If storytelling is about creating relationships, then it’s also about surviving and ensuring that our culture lives on. If we continue to tell and share our story even after losing access to our ancestral land, then we can continue to live l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation. And if storytelling produces and reproduces culture, then the decision by Iraqi and other Mizrahi Jews to tell our stories is also an act of survival.”
By Amy Wan
“When I received this damning review, I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to move forward. I was two years into a tenure track job where I was the only writing person and one of the only faculty of color in the department. I did not want to show any weakness at this moment in my career but I was struggling.”
by Mariam Mohammed
“I realized that navigating new academic and cultural landscapes as an international student often means confronting vulnerabilities that challenge both personal and academic boundaries. For me, pushing boundaries goes beyond leaving my comfort zone: it connects to how much I am willing to learn, unlearn, and relearn about myself.”
by Laura Gonzales, Anwesha Chattopadhyay, Judy Colindres, Chandler Mordecai, Dinalo Chakma, Payal Nagpal, Felipe González-Silva, and Kaylee Lamb
“At a time when immigration rhetoric is consistently influenced by racist and xenophobic policies in Florida and beyond, activists in our community have been hosting events focused on immigrant inclusion. Building on other efforts to increase inclusion in our city, as members of the large public University of Florida, we organized the event described here to support our community.”
by Victoria Houser and Eda Özyeşilpınar
“The constellation of stories we share offers a path for embodiment through solidarity with those who endured and are enduring religious-based gender violence. There is no such thing as an easy intervention in religious structures that perpetuate gendered violence. Even so, there are possibilities for us to find our way back into the body, and in sharing our stories here we offer others the opportunity to do the same.”
by Wilfredo Flores
“I especially foreground affect, as I have found through nearly five years of community organizing during my time as a PhD student that people often forget the nice white people who came to the community for a CV line and, instead, remember the feeling of being used.”
by Nabila Hijazi
“By utilizing their homemaking skills and transforming their domestic spaces, Syrian women demonstrate agency and resilience, becoming active agents in rebuilding their lives and creating a sustainable future for themselves and their families. They play transformative roles in preserving and evolving their cultures for future generations.”
by Alicia K. Hatcher
“For Black people in this country whose experiential knowledge has been informed by racial and social contracts (Mills, Charles), the creation of a subaltern counterpublic is a necessary survival tactic, informed by group cultural collective understanding—aka group meta-conceptualization.”
by Clarice A. Blanco
“Language is a distinguishing factor of cultural loyalty. To speak Spanish often means to be less American, and to speak English is to bring shame to my family’s sacrifices because it shows a willingness to assimilate.”
by Eric House
“I became a fan of Rapsody after one verse, and a bigger fan once I went back and explored her catalogue, but I was disappointed to learn that I didn’t know her although she’d been steadily releasing music for the past five years and had worked with many artists that I was familiar with. I began to question why Rapsody had been invisible and unknown to me, an avid and active hip-hop fan, until she appeared on a Kendrick Lamar album.”
by Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés
“The family photos and Super 8 footage document the performances of an immigrant, working-class family attempting a higher status. In sharing these, they sought to prove for themselves and, as noted in the video essay, for their/our families back on the island that they were not only surviving but thriving. In using these home movies and photos for ‘Dancing Danny,’ I am telling a story about family, grief, and memory and very much about love.”
by Cristina De León-Menjivar
“While a number of the writers in this study eventually do attempt to rhetorically balance their realities with illness and their roles as mothers, nearly all of the posts initially tackle the cultural discourse surrounding motherhood, illustrating how it has oppressed and marginalized them in their most personal and private moments.”
“This book made me confront the tension between seductive Eurocentric notions of ‘good’/’beautiful’ writing and the cultural rhetorics frameworks that have deeply reshaped my thinking about writing and knowledge-making over the past five years. Reflecting on Lahiri’s journey as a writer asked me to grapple with the kind of writer I want to be, the kind of writing space I want to co-create with students, and how I want them to understand the relationship between identity, land, and knowledge-making.”
“Dancing with the Devil affirms this conception of the stranger as the unfamiliar, the unnatural outsider, enticing women to join him in dance, warning others: this is what happens when you break the seemingly natural boundaries of the community established by traditional religious and cultural institutions. The stranger is a metaphor that becomes real, created to quell the anxiety felt by established norms and institutions during the Chicanx Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. But, the story lives on even today.”
“Mothers have been present in the academy for decades, making space for themselves and for the rest of us through their embodied presence, mentorship, and overt activism. Despite the presence of mothers in these earlier decades, mothers were largely instructed to keep their identities as mothers apart from their identities as scholars.”
“At a time of so much chaos and change, we posit that bridging digital writing and cultural rhetorics pedagogies can help teachers and students alike envision new futures and interventions within and beyond the university, as pedagogy can help bring healing and reflection in both classroom and community contexts.”
“But the Wanaragua is more than just a vibrant dance; it represents the most culturally significant part of the Christmas celebration. It is an embodied performance of resistance and resilience for the Garinagu of Belize.”
“We have indeed sought to publish work by and about BIPOC and diverse populations, and we will continue to do so, not because we think we are going to single-handedly take down the chains that bind us with this kind of scholarship, but because those diverse voices are rich and engaging and gift us with new territories to explore and transformative ideas to ponder.”
“The Park51 uproar had a ripple effect on Muslim communities throughout America with reports of arson, vandalism, and violence at mosques. The shutdown of Park51 was another reminder that the constitutional right to practice religion freely and build houses of worship does not apply to Muslims.”
“Trump denying that he is racist constructs an implied premise that (un)intentionally authorizes a white supremacist attitude: as long as a person is not the most racist person, a moderately or even severely racist person can overlook his or her own racial unawareness.”
“While approaching violence through assemblage is risky, the work of destabilizing dominant ways of looking cannot happen solely through written analysis. Visual production offers different ways of knowing for both maker and spectator, and violence is too prevalent and significant a problem to lay aside any tools available to reckon with it.”
“The hostile underpinnings of ‘women and children first’ became even clearer a few days after the Titanic’s sinking, when journalist Frances Wayne wrote an editorial for The Denver Post entitled, ‘Women must explain why they abandoned mates in death.'”
“While off-reservation boarding schools devastated indigenous language and kinship structures, they also generated inter-tribal coalitions that laid the groundwork for new waves of Indigenous activism in the twentieth century. In what follows, I read a series of artifacts from the Carlisle archive to explore how comparative cultural rhetorics work can benefit from the fine-grained inquiry that archival research affords.”
“The dirt under her fingernails, the traces of caring for the land, is the metaphor that guides our essay as we retell the memories we have of our migrant mothers, their care, their labor/s, and their fight, as well as the gendered criminalization of migrants in the U.S”
“Memory spaces are inherently material, requiring us to walk through them, look at them, read and think and use our other senses to understand them. Each of these acts is embodied and carried out in relation to the physical entity or space with which we are engaged.”
“The University of Utah Department of Athletics’ (or University of Utah Athletics Department) media guides released from 1990-2016 in the sports of gymnastics, men’s and women’s basketball, and football highlight the way the university utilizes the “Utes” nickname, circle and feathers logo, and Swoop mascot to construct a “Ute” brand. This “Ute” brand encompasses the logo, mascot, and nickname, and also a “Ute” identity that can be assumed and performed by athletes, fans, spectators, and media.”
“Settler archives haunt us all. In reading its contents, I gain a greater understanding of my brown(ed) body. Settler archives demand a carefully reckoning, to be sure, with erasure, death, terror, trauma, and settler invention practices, all of which affect how and why I speak today from a particular place, out of a particular history, and from a particular community practice.”
“Kagiso as a rhetorical concept allows us to understand a discourse of democracy not grounded solely in the West—and one not tied to the limited binary of democracy as either agonism or consensus. Kagiso offers a powerful, living example of a discursive tradition that transcends this simplistic dichotomy between agonism and consensus because harmony and dissent are held closely in productive contact.”
“The acknowledging of the filmmaker’s body can remind us that the process of cinematic production is dependent on the participation of others: every image carries the footprints of a culturally and historically situated way of knowing, the absence or presence of an agreement between the camera operator and the object of the gaze, the incentive of economic gain, power relations, gender roles, expected ways of behaving, and so on.”
“The goal of this article is to examine current forms of white privilege through the lens of whiteness studies and Hip Hop pedagogies in writing classrooms in order to begin to dismantle these kinds of damaging rhetoric in our society and ultimately raise student’s rhetorical awareness of the white privilege tropes that surround them.”
“Rasquache as cultural rhetorics theory and practice presents a robust approach to meaning making by allowing users to pull from the compendium of theories, ideas, experiences, tangible tools, and intangible epistemologies they can access. Recycling, upcycling, making do, and making new meaning through whatever is available is an explicit performance of rasquache.”
“Beyoncé won the 2017 Grammys in the same way she won the 2016 Super Bowl—by rewriting history with her flesh. To write skin is, like birth, to create futures.”
“We acknowledge the dissonance and disjointedness this project entails. Therefore, we provide no exhaustive remarks or conclusions, but rather a constellation of queer provocations. We work to render the ‘queer’ intelligible by making the piece and our responses to it seemingly unintelligible to heteronormative cultural logics.”