Issue 5

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

“Dear Spoonie Mom:” Digital Open Letters as Counter Narratives for Chronically Ill Mothers
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.”

Language as a Moving Anchor: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts, Asian/American Rhetorics & the Politics of “Linguistic Migration”
“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
“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
“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
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
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
“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.”
Issue 4

A Dance of Joy, Distress, and Tenderness: An Introduction to Our Fourth Issue
“COVID-19 has shown us that our bodies need to be close to other bodies, even when that closeness makes us vulnerable. Our bodies need to move, to emote, to connect to some communal rhythm and melody in order to think, create, thrive.”

Dancing with the Devil Revisited
“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.”

Constellating with our Foremothers: Stories of Mothers Making Space in Rhetoric and Composition
“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.”

Digital Writing and Cultural Rhetorics Pedagogies
“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.”

Wanaragua: An Embodied Performance of Resistance, Recognition and Resilience Among The Garinagu of Belize
“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.”

A Response to Cushman, Baca, and García’s College English Introduction
“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.”

Constellating Stories and Counterstories: Cultural Rhetorics Scholarship Principles
“cultural rhetorics is pushing the boundaries and erasing borders for the field at large, setting the mark of what rhetorical scholarship can be.”

Ethically Working Within Communities: Cultural Rhetorics Methodologies Principles
“Building and navigating relationships should start long before we collect any data.”

Community, Voice, Identity: The Principles of Cultural Rhetorics Pedagogies
“In all my classes, I want students to see themselves in the materials I assign and to reflect on texts/stories that are not primarily for them but another community.”

Storytelling and Relationality: Faculty Experiences During the Texas Winter Storm
“I want to hope that this is a reminder that universities are filled with people, and that nothing we do here should be more important than supporting one another’s ability to live and thrive.”

“Theory With No Practice Ain’t Shit”: A Review of Aja Y. Martinez’s Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory
“In short, Counterstory teaches and demonstrates how to incorporate anti-racist writing into any classroom via the ancient method of narrative, reframed to center BIPOC and non-normative voices and language use.”

Send My Love to the Family: A Review of Glasby, Gradin, and Ryerson’s Storytelling in Queer Appalachia: Imagining and Writing the Unspeakable Other
“This collection of eleven essays looks through singular narratives of a homogenous Appalachia—white, cisgendered or heteronormative, solely masculine, repressive, or backwards—to see many experiences of Appalachian queer identity, engaging narratives of exile, return, and liminality as the writers demonstrate that Appalachia itself is ‘a little bit quare.'”
Issue 3

What We Did the Year Everything Blew Up: An Introduction to Our Third Issue
“No matter where we stand, our ability and inability to make it through this mess is mingled with how we embrace (physically, mentally, emotionally, digitally) our relations.”

Never Forget: Ground Zero, Park51, and Constitutive Rhetorics
“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.”

Countering Racial Enthymemes: What We Can Learn About Race from Donald J. Trump
“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.”

Who Is Looking?: De-centering the Distant Spectator in Visual Rhetorics of Violence
“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.”

Commemorating Sexism: Suffragist Suppression, Partial Memory, and the Women’s Titanic Memorial
“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.'”

Care in Times of Crisis: How Faculty Are Managing COVID
“I had a minor breakdown due to all the stress—the panic set in and I just began to cry because it was all too much (being a mother to my children, being a good teacher, colleague, and activist for equity, diversity, and inclusion in my writing program).”

Recognizing New Styles: How Graduate Students Are Coping with COVID
“COVID-19 demonstrates the kind of support—both monetary and emotional support—that is needed to succeed. I feel like there is more exigence now while we are still in this pandemic. I think that graduate students can support one another by advocating for BIPOC students and other folks in the margins who need more from the university.” — B López.

Academic #BlackLivesMatter: Black Faculty and Graduate Students Tell Their Stories
“How has the university reflected on and named their own issues with systemic racism and oppression? How have they taken a closer look at how much money has been allocated toward campus police in comparison to developing programs and initiatives that actively challenge white supremacy within the campus climate?”
Issue 2

Ready for the long and wondrous road ahead: an introduction to issue 2 of constellations
“As they tenaciously place one foot in front of the other during their long existences, journals take copious unexpected and often electrifying turns. They perform some cryptic alchemy, blending the contributions of editors, authors, reviewers, and readers to fashion their own identities and personalities.”

The Historical Work of Cultural Rhetorics: Constellating Indigenous, Deaf, and English-Only Literacies
“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 My Mom’s Fingernails”: Queer Retellings and Migrant Sensualities
“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”

Performing Gender Asymmetry: Material Rhetoric and Representation at the National Museum of American History
“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 “Utes:” Towards Increased Rhetorical Sovereignty
“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.”

A Settler Archive: A Site for a Decolonial Praxis Project
“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.”
Issue 1

Welcome to constellations: a kind of storied introduction
“Our central theory-to-practice tenet has been to value and practice cultural rhetorics orientations in our day-to-day editorial work with one another, with reviewers and mentors, and with authors. We do that in a number of ways but one you’ll notice as you engage the pieces here is a practice of honoring all contributors to a piece, including those whose labor usually goes unseen.”

Toward a Rhetoric of Kagiso: Rhetoric and Democracy in Botswana
“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.”

Embodied Encounters: A Case for Autobiographical and Haptic Filmmaking
“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 Struggle is Real: Whiteness Studies, Hip Hop Pedagogies, and the Rhetorics of White Privilege
“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 Rhetorics: a cultural rhetorics sensibility
“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’s Performance of Identification as a Diamond: Reclaiming Bodies and Voices in “Formation”
“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.”

What Fucking Clayton Pettet Teaches Us About Cultural Rhetorics
“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.”

4C4Equality: Writing Networks for Social Justice
edited by Don Unger and Liz Lane
The 4C4Equality initiative focuses on writing networks for social justice. To that end, this web text provides a platform for activist-scholars in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies to learn from, support, and productively challenge one another in developing local work and in resisting draconian policies emerging from the current US political regime.