This collection explores decolonial shifts in composition and rhetoric informed by strategies for potentially decolonizing language and literacy practices, writing and rhetorical instruction, and research practices and methods. The discipline of composition and rhetoric stands at a crossroad in its pedagogical, research, and public commitments. Decolonial ruptures in writing and rhetoric studies work to build new horizons, new histories, of local knowledges and meaning-making practices that break from Western hegemonic models of knowledge production. This collection functions as one access point within a constellation of such work, forming an ecology of decolonial shifts informed by strategies for potentially decolonizing language and literacy practices, writing and rhetorical instruction, and research practices and methods. Rhetorics elsewhere and otherwise emerge across a spectrum, from geo- and body politics of knowledge and understanding to local histories emerging from colonial peripheries. Romeo García and Damián Baca offer the expressions elsewhere and otherwise as invitations to join existing networks and envision pluriversal ways of thinking, writing, and teaching that surpass the field's Eurocentric geographies, cartographies, and chronologies.

Viva Nuestro Caucus celebrates the history of the Latinx Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English and of the College Composition and Communication Conference since its inception in 1968 as the Chicano Teachers of English. The Caucus emerged because of a lack of representation and support and today maintains its vision and agenda of advocating for Latino peoples. The impetus for Viva Nuestro Caucus began both from a lack of recognition amongst NCTE and CCCC and an acknowledgment that no written history exists of the Caucus. Its editors provide a partial history of the agendas, activities, and achievements of the Caucus from its formation to the present, set against the backdrop of changing times. It includes interviews with founding and current Caucus members, an annotated Caucus archive, and a working bibliography of publications by Caucus members.

American by Paper reveals how two groups of immigrants who share a primary language nevertheless have very different experiences of literacy in the United States. It describes the social realities facing documented and undocumented immigrants who use everyday acts of writing to negotiate papers—the visas, green cards, and passports that promise access to the American Dream. It is both an ethnography, filled with illuminating details about contemporary immigrant lives, and a critical intervention into two leading—and conflicting—scholarly ideas of literacy and its social role. Although popular thinking and scholarship have viewed literacy as a method of culturally assimilating immigrants into the nation, Kate Vieira finds that upward mobility and social inclusion in the United States are tied to literacy in complex ways. She draws from extensive interviews with Portuguese-speaking migrants who live and work together in a former mill town in Massachusetts that she calls South Mills: one group from the Azores, who are usually documented, and another from Brazil, who are usually undocumented. She explains how these migrants experience literacy not as a vehicle for assimilation (as educational policy makers often assert) nor as a means of resisting oppression (as literacy scholars often hope) but instead as tied up in papers, particularly in the papers that confer legal status. Papers and literacy are inextricably bound together, both promoting and constraining opportunities, and they shape why and how migrants read and write. Vieira builds on insights from literacy theories that have long been in opposition to each other in order to develop a new sociomaterial theory of literacy, one that takes into account its inseparable link to paper, forms, and documentation. This point of view leads to a deeper understanding of how literacy actually accrues meaning by circulating, and recirculating, through institutions and the lives of individuals.

The Wound and the Stitch traces a history of imagery and language centered on the concept of woundedness and the stitching together of fragmented selves. Focusing particularly on California and its historical violences against Chicanx bodies, Loretta Victoria Ramirez argues that woundedness has become a ubiquitous and significant form of Chicanx self-representation, especially in late twentieth-century print media and art. Ramirez maps a genealogy of the female body from late medieval Iberian devotional sculptures to contemporary strategies of self-representation. By doing so, she shows how wounds—metaphorical, physical, historical, and linguistic—are inherited and manifested as ongoing violations of the body and othered forms of identity. Beyond simply exposing these wounds, however, Ramirez also shows us how they can be healed—or rather stitched. Drawing on Mesoamerican concepts of securing stability during lived turmoil, or nepantla, Ramirez investigates how creators such as Cherríe Moraga, Renee Tajima-Peña, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Amalia Mesa-Bains repurpose the concept of woundedness to advocate for redress and offer delicate, ephemeral moments of healing. Positioning woundedness as a potent method to express Chicanx realities and transform the self from one that is wounded to one that is stitched, this book emphasizes the necessity of acknowledgment and ethical restitution for colonial legacies. It will be valued by scholars and students interested in the history of rhetorics, twentieth-century Chicanx art, and Latinx studies.

Like every discipline, Rhetorical Studies relies on a technical vocabulary to convey specialized concepts, but few disciplines rely so deeply on a set of terms developed so long ago. Pathos, kairos, doxa, topos—these and others originate from the so-called classical world, which has conferred on them excessive authority. Without jettisoning these rhetorical terms altogether, this handbook addresses critiques of their ongoing relevance, explanatory power, and exclusionary effects. A New Handbook of Rhetoric inverts the terms of classical rhetoric by applying to them the alpha privative, a prefix that expresses absence. Adding the prefix α- to more than a dozen of the most important terms in the field, the contributors to this volume build a new vocabulary for rhetorical inquiry. Essays on apathy, akairos, adoxa, and atopos, among others, explore long-standing disciplinary habits, reveal the denials and privileges inherent in traditional rhetorical inquiry, and theorize new problems and methods. Using this vocabulary in an analysis of current politics, media, and technology, the essays illuminate aspects of contemporary culture that traditional rhetorical theory often overlooks. Innovative and groundbreaking, A New Handbook of Rhetoric at once draws on and unsettles ancient Greek rhetorical terms, opening new avenues for studying values, norms, and phenomena often stymied by the tradition. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Caddie Alford, Benjamin Firgens, Cory Geraths, Anthony J. Irizarry, Mari Lee Mifsud, John Muckelbauer, Bess R. H. Myers, Damien Smith Pfister, Nathaniel A. Rivers, and Alessandra Von Burg.

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics offers a broad and comprehensive understanding of comparative or world rhetoric, from ancient times to the modern day. Bringing together an international team of established and emergent scholars, this Handbook looks beyond Greco-Roman traditions in the study of rhetoric to provide an international, cross-cultural study of communication practices around the globe. With dedicated sections covering theory and practice, history, pedagogy, hybrids and the modern context, this extensive collection will provide the reader with a solid understanding of: how comparative rhetoric evolved how it re-defines and expands the field of rhetorical studies what it contributes to our understanding of human communication its implications for the advancement of related fields, such as composition, technology, language studies, and literacy. In a world where understanding how people communicate, argue, and persuade is as important as understanding their languages, The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics is an essential resource for scholars and students of communication, composition, rhetoric, cultural studies, cultural rhetoric, cross-cultural studies, transnational studies, translingual studies, and languages.

In The Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle demonstrates the purpose of rhetoric—the ability to convince people using your skill as a speaker rather than the validity or logic of your arguments—and outlines its many forms and techniques. Defining important philosophical terms like ethos, pathos, and logos, Aristotle establishes the earliest foundations of modern understanding of rhetoric, while providing insight into its historic role in ancient Greek culture. Aristotle’s work, which dates from the fourth century B.C., was written while the author lived in Athens, remains one of the most influential pillars of philosophy and has been studied for centuries by orators, public figures, and politicians alike. HarperTorch brings great works of non-fiction and the dramatic arts to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperTorch collection to build your digital library.