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Issue 5

Migrations, Moves, and Aftermaths: An Introduction to Issue 5 of constellations

Migrations, Moves, and Aftermaths: An Introduction to Issue 5 of constellations

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“The work featured in our fifth issue is thematically linked by its meditations on the in-between—the uncomfortable, beautiful, devastating space we navigate as we reach for one thing while keeping our feet planted on another. Our authors move between cultures, cities, states, countries, languages, and friendships. They move between motherhood and chronic illness, between losing a sibling and gaining a deeper understanding of who they are in the aftermath, between disappointment and curiosity as a beloved novelist takes an inexplicable departure in the themes she explores.”

Dancing Danny

Dancing Danny

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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.”

Language as a Moving Anchor: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts, Asian/American Rhetorics & the Politics of “Linguistic Migration”

Language as a Moving Anchor: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts, Asian/American Rhetorics & the Politics of “Linguistic Migration”

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by Vani Kannan
“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.”

Tenure Under Attack: An Examination of Tenure’s Viability and Value in the Neoliberal Academy

Tenure Under Attack: An Examination of Tenure’s Viability and Value in the Neoliberal Academy

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by Carmen Kynard, José Manuel Cortez, Khadeidra Billingsley, José Luis Cano Jr., Alexis McGee, and Ana Milena Ribero
“The recent attacks on tenure illustrate not only the usual US anti-intellectualism, but also the alignment of various strands of the pandemic milieu: conservative attacks against liberal and anti-racist education, panics over the decreasing value of productivity culture, and a changing US demographic.”

A Constellation of Crises: Teaching with Technology During COVID

A Constellation of Crises: Teaching with Technology During COVID

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by Laura Gonzales, Alexandria L. Lockett, Dennis Foung, Morgan C. Banville, Sonia Arellano, and Lauren Brentnell
“Many of us already had done work integrating technology or online instruction into our courses, but the shifts in institutional and student expectations, as well as personal losses that affected our lives, made us continue to reflect upon these practices.”

Leigh Gruwell’s Making Matters: Craft, Ethics, and New Materialist Rhetorics

Leigh Gruwell’s Making Matters: Craft, Ethics, and New Materialist Rhetorics

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by Shiva Mainaly
“The practice of materialist rhetorics by the indigenous people of North America since time immemorial illustrates how to push back on the oppressive and exclusionary contours of power, with an intent on making it accountable via shifting the very positionality of any actant within a rhetorical assemblage in a manner most ethical and responsible. In point of fact, this is the pith and marrow of Gruwell’s text being reviewed here.”

Black Tech Matters: A Review of Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software

Black Tech Matters: A Review of Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software

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by Codi Renee Blackmon
“McIlwain’s archival work illustrates how throughout the history of digital technologies, Black people have always learned how to master technical worlds and make software to help each other, providing more culturally informed narratives to the history of the Internet. Even something as simple as putting their own Blackness and Black interests onto the Web in the 1990s and the 2000s was a radical act.”

“You Know, Anger Can Be Righteous”: A Review of James Chase Sanchez’s Salt of the Earth and Joel Fendelman’s Man on Fire

“You Know, Anger Can Be Righteous”: A Review of James Chase Sanchez’s Salt of the Earth and Joel Fendelman’s Man on Fire

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by Stella Takvoryan
“In Salt of the Earth, Sanchez unpacks how Grand Saline’s storytelling tradition sustains and preserves white supremacy by constellating his most salient memories of Grand Saline (Sanchez, personal interview) and scholarship on the rhetorics of race and racism, protest, silence, cultural rhetorics, and storytelling as methodology.”