How to Get a Nonacademic Position An Essay on Serendipity—Personal, Professional, and Intellectual

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The title of my first Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) presentation is there on my vita for anyone to see. But I expect that few who look at my vita, if anyone does other than to count up numbers of talks, article, books, and so on, have noticed that my first CCCC conference talk was on the subject of “How to Get a Non-Academic Position.”

There’s a story behind that talk, which when I gave it I assumed would be both my first and last CCCC presentation. Here it is in brief: I entered the PhD program in English at Ohio State University in the fall of 1970 not even knowing that it was possible to undertake study in the field that we have come to call rhetoric and composition (or some related title). My area was Victorian literature, and by the time that Susan Miller and Andrea Lunsford came to Ohio State (Susan to direct the writing program and Andrea to cobble together the first PhD program of study in rhet/comp in the English department), I was well underway on a dissertation on the Victorian nonsense literature of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.

I was also quite involved with the writing program—not only through my own teaching but also as a result of my participation in the teaching assistant (TA) council that advised the Director of Writing. To say that Susan Miller brought energy and intellectual excitement to the writing program is an understatement. Susan brought in outside speakers (David Bartholomae! Rick Coe! Erika Lindemann!), and she spoke of the development of a new field. (Later I would learn that depending on your perspective the field wasn’t so new. I would also learn of the important role that OSU Professor Edward P. J. Corbett played in the field’s contemporary formation. At the time, I knew Professor Corbett primarily as a scholar of eighteenth-century literature.)

I still remember the moment when, in the spring term of my final year of grad school, I was sitting in Susan’s office discussing some matter related to the TA advisory council that I then chaired. “Lisa,” Susan said to me, “you are going to have to make some decisions about your future career. You’re going to have to decide how seriously you want to take the teaching of writing as a profession.” Given the job market at the time—reportedly the worst for PhDs in the humanities since the depression—the notion of a “future career” in the academy was hard to imagine. By the time Susan and I had that conversation, I had already gone on the job market once (earlier that year) with no luck, and I was getting ready to put myself out there a second time. I would support myself during what I hoped would be a transitional year by working as an editor at a sociology research center on campus, and I was grateful to have that opportunity for full-time employment.

The year that I completed my dissertation is a blur now, and it probably was then too. But at some point in 1975, I realized that the upcoming 1976 CCCC would be in Philadelphia. My good friends and graduate school colleagues Andrea Lunsford and Suellynn Duffey were planning to go to the conference and would share a university van. I could travel with them if I proposed a talk and had it accepted. Attending the conference would give me a chance to learn more about the emerging field of rhet/comp, and giving a talk there would look good on my vita. I had already decided that when I went on the job market the following year I would apply both for Victorian literature and (newly created) rhet/comp positions and see what happened.

Like many of my peers, I was at a crossroads, and my future looked uncertain. My immediate challenge was to determine a topic and write a proposal. Why not draw upon my good fortune in finding what we would now call an alt academic position? Others might benefit from my experience of turning part-time work that supplemented my TA stipend into a full-time editing position. Hence my topic: How to Get a Non-Academic Position. Given the job market, I knew this would be a useful presentation for others whose situation resembled mine. And indeed the panel on which I participated was well attended.

By the time I gave that talk in the spring of 1976, I thought that my future was clear—and that it would not follow a traditional academic path. I had interviewed for two or three positions (a pitiful but at the time not unusual number) at the MLA the previous December in San Francisco. No job offers came my way. I did get a letter from the State University of New York (SUNY) Brockport saying that they were interested in my candidacy, but their position was frozen. I had been in my editing position for several terms by this point, and I liked it. I had already decided not to put myself through the job market process again. Why humiliate myself a third time?

So I gave that talk. I was energized by the conference, but I thought that my future was set: I would be an editor of scholarly publications—and I was grateful to have work that I enjoyed and that was meaningful to me. Then in the summer of 1976 SUNY Brockport called. Their position was unfrozen. They wanted to interview me on campus. Could I come? I did, and I was offered a tenure-line position of Director of Composition at that university.

Serendipity indeed.

I will have more to say about the role that serendipity has played in my career later in this essay. For now, I want to note the important role that certain key preferences and predilections have played in my life and career. I should perhaps be embarrassed to admit this, but I knew as early as middle school that I wanted to be a teacher, and looking back I can easily identify teachers who made a huge difference in my life. Mrs. Ryan in middle school, who taught me to love history and affirmed my identity as a serious student who cared enough to get my own subscription to my first scholarly (or semischolarly) journal: the hard-bound American Heritage. Mrs. Falk in high school (AP English junior and senior years) who required students to write an essay (some more formal than others) every day of the school year, and who developed what I later realized was an early form of portfolio evaluation.

I also knew as early as grade school that I loved reading and writing and that they were central to my sense of myself, though of course I couldn’t have articulated that at this point. By the time I was in high school I knew what I wanted to be: a high school English teacher. I loved teaching, and I loved literature—and teachers consistently praised my writing. What I discovered when I did my student teaching for my undergraduate English education degree at Ohio State was that I didn’t love the public school system—at least not the crowded inner city school where I taught. So I did what seemed natural to many students of my age and temperament at that turbulent but exciting time: I applied to grad school.

I barely knew what I was doing. I applied to only two universities—Cornell and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I have no idea how I chose them other than that they were outside of Ohio, where my family lived, but not too far away. I ended up in Madison with an out-of state tuition remission scholarship. The English department had just abolished the first-year writing requirement in retaliation against teaching assistants who had spearheaded a failed move toward unionization, so TA positions were available only to a limited number of PhD students. I supported myself during my one-year MA program by working at the Wisconsin State Department of Education, even as I marched with others in massive campus protests against the Vietnam War.

My time in Madison was difficult. I did well in my courses, but the MA program was huge: some of my MA classes that year were larger than my undergrad English classes had been at Ohio State. While some courses and professors were excellent, the goal of the program—to pass a test that included multiple-choice questions (example: Upon what does the worm sit in Blake’s Book of Thel?) at the end of the year—was uninspiring. So I applied to the PhD program at Ohio State. I did so not as a result of serious research about PhD programs or careful career planning but rather to reconnect with my then boyfriend. When I counsel students who are making decisions about grad school applications, I am astonished at the knowledge and professionalism they bring to this task. I had neither.

It was at Ohio State that I had my first experiences teaching undergraduates and my first involvement with the rhet/comp field. My interest in audience also developed in grad school. A chance conversation with a fellow TA about an assignment that he was experimenting with, one that required students to write to real or hypothetical audiences, piqued my curiosity. I began to experiment with nontraditional assignments—assignments that one way or another encouraged students to engage in writing tasks that at least offered the possibility of something resembling an authentic experience. My first publication, a brief essay entitled “Oral History,” which appeared in CCC in 1977, explored one such assignment. (Ed Corbett, who by this time was a mentor and also the editor of CCC, encouraged me every step of the way in this, my
first publication.) My second publication, also in CCC, attempted to formalize some of the questions that I had begun to ask myself about the role of audience in discourse and in the teaching of writing. This essay, “On Audience and Composition,” appeared in 1979.

As I transitioned from the field of Victorian literature to that of rhet/comp, I experienced a satisfying sense of coming full circle. My earliest aspiration had been to become an English teacher, which I knew meant being a teacher not only of literature but also of writing. When I entered grad school, that goal shifted, and I focused on the scholarly work of English studies—at least in my coursework. But my teaching drew me back to my aspirations as a teacher. With my “conversion” to rhet/comp, I felt a renewed sense of pedagogical commitment and purpose, one that was strengthened with my position directing the writing program at SUNY Brockport.

In my early years at SUNY Brockport, I had a very steep learning curve: I was the sole “expert” on the teaching of writing on my campus, even as I was attempting to educate myself about my new field. In hindsight, I see that serendipity played a role here too. While some of my contemporaries entered the field in the late 1970s and early 1980s as graduate students in rhet/comp, many others “converted” to the field after completing PhDs in literary studies. (For a discussion of this phenomenon, see chapter three of my Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location). The timing was fortuitous. In the wake of a purported literacy crisis (one that ultimately was more about a new generation of students entering college than a real decline of literacy), funding was available to “solve” the problem of illiteracy. Definitions of expertise in the field of rhet/comp were evolving, and commitment and pedagogical/administrative experience in many instances counted as much as a traditional graduate education—particularly given the tiny number of rhet/ comp grad programs at the time.

The more I learned about writing and rhetoric, the more engaged I became in questions about the role of audience in writing and the teaching of writing. This quest for understanding led to additional serendipitous moments in my career. The first was when I was accepted into Richard Young’s 1978–79 yearlong NEH seminar at Carnegie Mellon. My proposed topic? To explore the concept of identification in classical rhetoric, Burke’s dramatistics, and Pike’s tagmemics. At the heart of this study was my continued interest in audience. In the years since I “converted” from Victorian literature to rhet/comp, I had gained a much richer understanding of both the classical and contemporary rhetorical traditions, an understanding that was dramatically enriched by my year of study with Richard Young and with fellow seminarians Jim Berlin, Victor Vitanza, Sam Watson, Charles Kneupper, and others.

The NEH seminar was an intellectual and professional boost, and it gave me the confidence to go back on the job market. I valued my work at SUNY Brockport and enjoyed my colleagues—and I continued to marvel at the serendipity that led to my first tenure-line appointment but in the late 1970s, the college was in the midst of a serious financial crisis. Even my colleagues encouraged me to consider other options, grimly citing the possibility of what one referred to with dark humor as tenure on the Titanic. The time seemed right for a change. I interviewed for the position of Director of Writing at Oregon State and was offered it.

OSU looked like a good professional opportunity, but I have to admit that for my husband and me the thought of living in the Pacific Northwest played an important role in my decision to accept the position. Avid hikers and backpackers, we loved the thought of living in a place where we could be in the mountains in two hours and at the coast in one hour. Our friends Andrea and Steve Lunsford also were living in the Northwest—Andrea’s first job was at the University of British Columbia—and told wonderful stories of life there.

Once we moved to Oregon, the four of us took advantage of every opportunity we could to be together, traveling the eight hours up and down the I-5 corridor at least once a term, and more often in the summer. Andrea’s and my collaboration, which has played such an important role in my career, could not have taken off—especially given the technological limitations of the time (no email, no word processing, etc.) without that physical proximity. Even so, Andrea and I first collaborated almost by accident. With our friend Robert Connors, we were coediting Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse, a collection in honor of our mentor Edward P. J. Corbett. We were vacationing on the Oregon coast, and while on a long walk it suddenly occurred to us that it might be rewarding to write a collaborative essay for that collection. We had each planned on contributing an individual essay. Our memories of our motivation differ somewhat. I remember thinking that it would please Ed Corbett. Andrea remembers thinking that it might be practical and efficient to write together, given our other responsibilities as coeditors. We both agree that serendipity played a role in our decision to write together. Without that chance conversation, our long collaboration might never have happened.

Andrea’s and my essay “On Distinctions between Classical and Modern Rhetoric” was published in Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse in 1984. We were surprised by how much we enjoyed writing together and, especially, how productive our collaboration was. It was clear to us that working together encouraged us to be particularly ambitious and to challenge ourselves in ways that we might not have done if we were writing alone. So to us, it felt natural to continue to undertake significant collaborations—even as we each engaged in individual projects. However, what felt natural and productive to us was anything but to our colleagues. In fact, we quickly realized that many of our colleagues (including Ed Corbett) viewed our collaboration as shocking—even dangerous. “You will never get tenure if you insist on writing together,” Andrea and I remember Ed fretfully warning us. And his concerns were justified. When Andrea prepared her materials for promotion and tenure at UBC she was told by her chair that “of course her collaborative work couldn’t be considered.” Anticipating similar difficulties, my chair invited Andrea to “spontaneously” send him a letter noting that all of our collaborations were equal. Nevertheless, my college’s promotion and tenure committee requested that Andrea and I go through all of our coauthored essays and use colored markers to indicate who had written which sentence. Needless to say, we refused—and fortunately I was promoted and tenured despite this refusal.

Earlier in this essay, I commented on the importance of key preferences and predilections, and in the case of Andrea’s and my collaboration I would have to call attention to our stubbornness. The more people challenged our desire to write together, the more persistent we were in attempting to understand—and critique—the preference for single authorship in the humanities. This led to our 1990 Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, and to much additional work. But our very close friendship also played a central role in our collaboration.

In 2012 Andrea and I published Writing Together: Collaboration in Theory and Practice, a collection of previously published and new work. The collection gives a good sense of the range of topics we have explored over thirty plus years of collaboration. In the first section, we address the question “Why Write Together?” The second section includes several chapters from our 1990 Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, as well as more recent thoughts on this topic. The third section focuses on our research on audience and includes our essay “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Practice,” our most anthologized work; the fourth, on rhetorics and feminisms, and the final section on writing centers. Each section concluded with a new essay written especially for this collection.

Putting this collection together was a joyful act; however, I do not want to romanticize our collaboration. In the introduction and in various new essays, Andrea and I attempt to dispel some potential myths about our collaboration. No, we have not always been “together” and not always been in accord. Yes, we have experienced some painful personal and professional moments as a result of our collaboration. But yes, despite the complexities that are part of any human experience, we are grateful for the journey that we have taken together.

One powerful insight that we slowly came to recognize in recent years is the extent to which developments in new literacies and technologies have caused what we always viewed as two more or less separate strands of research—our work on audience and on collaborative writing—to merge. As we note in “‘Among the Audience’: On Audience in an Age of New Literacies,” another of the new essays in Writing Together, we have come to understand that

as writers and audiences merge and shift places in online environments, participating in both brief and extended collaborations, it is increasingly obvious that writers seldom, if ever, write alone. In short, when receivers or consumers of information become creators of content as well, it is increasingly difficult to tell when writers are collaborative writers or authors and when they are members of audiences. (238)

This insight has played an important role in our recent research—and also in a relatively new textbook that we have undertaken with coauthors Michal Brody, Beverly Moss, Carole Clark Papper, and Keith Walters. (Our editor Marilyn Moller has also played an essential role in this project.) Everyone’s an Author attempts to respond to the exigencies described in this statement and to present rhetorical strategies appropriate to twenty-first-century readers and writers.

I mentioned earlier that one of the sections in Writing Together focuses on Andrea’s and my research on feminisms and rhetorics. I would like to say a bit more about my (and Andrea’s and my) engagement with feminist research in our field. I have already noted how rewarding it felt when I transitioned from Victorian literature to rhet/comp to reaffirm my strong commitment to teaching and to find a way formally to express that commitment. I felt a similar sense of satisfaction in the 1990s as my research increasingly engaged feminist theories and practices. A strong feminist since my undergraduate days, I did not originally see how to make connections between my personal and scholarly commitments.2 My friend Beth Flynn emphasized the importance of making these connections in her pathbreaking 1988 CCC article “Composing as a Woman.” In my case, that meant making a transition from research that focused primarily on classical and contemporary rhetorical theory to explicitly feminist research. In that regard, I view the article that Cheryl Glenn, Andrea, and I coauthored, “Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism,” which was published in Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric in 1995, as a particularly important turning point.

When we published this piece, Cheryl, Andrea, and I knew that it was important work: we believe that our article was the first feminist article published in Rhetorica, a journal that until that point had focused on traditional rhetorical historiography and analysis. That article also planted a seed in Cheryl’s and my minds. In the fall of 1995, our chair invited us to cocoordinate a one-time conference on any topic that we thought might draw interest. (At that time, Cheryl was still teaching at Oregon State and had not yet moved to Penn State.) Cheryl and I pinned our hopes and dreams on the then-still-nascent topic of rhetorics and feminisms. In August 1997 the conference “From Boundaries to Borderlands: Rhetoric(s) and Feminism(s)” was held at OSU. Just as I assumed that my 1976 CCCC presentation on how to get
a nonacademic position would be my first and last appearance at the CCCC, so too did Cheryl and I assume that “From Boundaries to Borderlands” would be a one-time phenomenon. However, near the end of the conference Lillian Bridwell-Bowles and Lisa Albrecht announced that the conference was so powerful as a site of feminist research, inquiry, and networking that it had to continue, and that the University of Minnesota would sponsor it in two years. Thus was the first of what has come to be an ongoing succession of conferences exploring the intersections of feminisms and rhetorics. (For more on the history of the feminisms and rhetorics conference series, which is now sponsored by the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, see the chapter on that topic in Writing Together.)

Sometimes we recognize a serendipitous occurrence the moment it happens: that was definitely the case when I was offered my first tenure line position at SUNY Brockport (which I am happy to report has weathered its earlier financial storm nicely). Sometimes we can only recognize serendipity in action in hindsight, as was the case with the chance conversation that caused Andrea and me to undertake our first collaborative project.

I certainly didn’t recognize it as a serendipitous moment when during my interview in 1980 at Oregon State the chair nonchalantly mentioned, “We wondered if in addition to directing the writing program you’d also agree to head up the writing center . . .”—but it was. Even though this meant that I would direct two writing programs as an untenured assistant professor, my thirty-plus years of directing OSU’s Writing Center, and thus of being able to interact with colleagues like Lex Runciman, Jon Olson, Wayne Robertson, and Dennis Bennett and literally hundreds of writing assistants, has been a highlight of my career. My work with the writing assistants and with student writers at the Center also played an important role in my decision to write a first-year writing textbook. That book has gone through ten editions since it was first published in 1989. The first six editions came out under the title Work in Progress: A Guide to Academic Writing and Revising. After a radical revisioning of the text, it reappeared in 2008 as The Academic Writer: A Brief Guide for Students. This text is now in its fourth edition.

I am grateful for the opportunity that writing this essay has given me to take a long view of my scholarly work, and of the personal, intellectual, and professional commitments and predilections that, in hindsight, have proven to be constant (if not always visible, and certainly not always conscious) threads. In that regard, I would like to turn again to the dissertation I wrote on the Victorian nonsense of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Imagine my surprise when Patrick Bizzaro contacted me in the late 1990s wanting to interview me about possible connections between my dissertation topic and my subsequent work in composition, especially my interest in audience. Up to this point, I had viewed these two research interests as completely disconnected. As Bizzaro persuasively argues in his 1999 CCC essay, “What I Learned in Grad School, or Literary Training and the Theorizing of Composition,” the connections that I originally couldn’t see were nevertheless there. Bizzaro cites frequent statements of concern about miscommunication, a predilection for ranging broadly in terms of sources and disciplines, and a preference for what Bizzaro terms “a tactic of complication” as connections between my dissertation and my work on audience. (In case you’re interested, Bizzaro also looks at connections between the dissertations of other scholars of my generation who “converted” to composition after completing PhDs in literature, including William Irmscher, Linda Flower, Art Young, David Bartholomae, Erika Lindemann, Toby Fulwiler, and Peter Elbow.)

Bizzaro’s essay was published in part two of a special issue of CCC, “A Usable Past: CCC at 50.” In the introduction to this issue, editor Joseph Harris writes of the importance of uncovering “a people’s history of our field” (559). This and other essays in this collection contribute, I hope, to this project. It goes without saying that a true people’s history of any field requires diverse contributions from diversely situated participants. A colleague fresh out of grad school or in the first ten years of his or her postgraduate career would
necessarily (and refreshingly) have a different story to tell than I have.

In my own narrative, I have tried to emphasize the central role that serendipity has played in my career, while also emphasizing that key preferences and predilections can also be relevant. But I should also acknowledge that what the editors of this volume refer to as accidental sagacity played a role as well. After all, my long-time commitment to teaching encouraged me to take advantage of the kairotic opportunities that I had as a graduate student at Ohio State when Susan Miller took over the writing program. Mentors also played an important role. Some mentors were inspirational intellectually; Susan surely was that. But other equally important mentors intervened in practical ways in my career. When I came to Oregon State, for instance, my contract stated that I would teach eight courses out of a usual nine-course load (over three quarters). When my chair Robert Frank realized how much I was up against directing two writing programs as an untenured assistant professor (no one in the English department knew anything about the writing center, which had been connected with another unit and was radically underfunded), he rearranged my schedule so that I taught one course  that entire year. He was also an advocate for rhet/comp at a time when most members of my department saw it as a new and questionable area—an assumption that I am happy to say has changed considerably over the years.

In turning toward my conclusion, I should acknowledge that as I worked on this essay I found myself troubled by a persistent question:

how do I avoid the potential narcissism inherent in a focus on my research, my career?

What do I have to say, I found myself asking over and over as I sat fretting at my computer, that might be of some use to those who are earlier in their scholarly and professional paths? At a minimum, I hope that I have documented, however sketchily, a particular moment in the development of the field of rhetoric and composition—a moment when a PhD student could begin writing a dissertation thinking that (if lucky) she was embarking on a career teaching literature only to discover that a (to her) new field would issue her an invitation in the form of mentors and colleagues like Susan Miller, Ed Corbett, Andrea Lunsford, Beth Flynn, Suellynn Duffey, Robert Connors, Jim Berlin, Victor Vitanza, and others.

I hope that this essay reminds readers that ethical questions are always present for any member of any field, including our own. In Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location, I attempted to raise some questions about the costs as well as the benefits of composition’s professionalization. My goal in this study is not to challenge the value of theory but rather to remind scholars in our field of our responsibilities given academic hierarchies of knowledge, which value the practice of theory over the practice of teaching. In so doing, I call attention to the importance of considering what philosopher Linda Alcoff refers to in her much cited essay “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” I appreciate the ongoing efforts of younger scholars to continue this conversation and to find powerful and persuasive ways to act upon it.

Throughout this essay, I have attempted to call attention to the role that serendipity plays in (I would argue) any career in any field—but especially in the academy, where individual success is both highly valorized and (in research universities, at least) narrowly defined in terms of scholarly productivity. Over the years, I have looked for any and every opportunity to share the story of my first CCCC talk with graduate students and colleagues. So often it can be tempting to think that someone who has managed to secure a tenureline position and to publish was somehow destined for success. I like to think that in our current climate—where many are advocating for contingent faculty members and exploring alt-academic careers—this assumption has been vigorously challenged. If my narrative can help further dislodge this assumption, I would be pleased.

Works Cited

Alcoff, Linda. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique 37 (1991): 5–32. Print.

Bizzaro, Patrick. “What I Learned in Grad School, or Literary Training and the Theorizing of Composition.” CCC 50 (1999): 722–42. Print.

Connors, Robert J., Lisa Ede, and Andrea Lunsford, eds. Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984. Print.

Ede, Lisa. The Academic Writer: A Brief Guide for Students. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s P, 1989. (2nd ed., 1992; 3rd ed., 2014; 4th ed., 2017). Print.

———. “On Audience and Composition.” CCC 30 (1979): 291–95. Print.

———. “Oral History.” CCC 28 (1977): 380–83. Print.

———. Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. Print.

———. Work in Progress: A Guide to Academic Writing and Revising. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s P, 1989. (2nd ed., 1992; 3rd ed., 1995; 4th ed., 1998; 5th ed., 2001; 6th ed., 2004). Print.

Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.” CCC 35.2 (May 1984): 155–71. Print.

———. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. (Paperback ed., 1992). Print.

Ede, Lisa, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford. “Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism.” Rhetorica 13 (1995): 285–325. Print.

Flynn, Elizabeth A. “Composing as a Woman.” CCC 39 (1988): 423–35. Print.

Lunsford, Andrea, Michal Brody, Lisa Ede, Beverly Moss, Carole Clark Papper, and Keith Walters. Everyone’s an Author. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. (2nd ed., 2017). Print.

Lunsford, Andrea, and Lisa Ede. Writing Together: Collaboration in Theory and Practice. Bedford/
St. Martin’s P, 2012. Print.

Editors’ Introduction

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We are so excited to be launching the first issue of Peitho as a new editorial team! We, co-editors Rebecca Dingo (overseeing articles), Clancy Ratliff (overseeing Recoveries and Reconsiderations), and Temptaous McKoy (overseeing the book reviews) along with our stellar team of assistants Ashley Canter, Stacy Earp, and Stacie Klinowski, and our web coordinator Kelli Lycke, we’ve been working together to curate this issue since this summer and to continue the most excellent work of out-going editor, Jen Wingard and her assistant, Rachelle Joplin. We thank Jen and Rachelle for taking the time to on-board our new team and to pass on to us a well-organized journal with cutting–edge feminist scholarship. Amid our enthusiasm for this issue, we also mourn the passing of Lisa Ede, who died on September 29, 2021, and we take the work of memorializing her very seriously. The pieces in this issue are thoughtful, heartfelt reflections on Ede’s legacy as a scholar, mentor, and teacher. We would like to thank The Ohio State University Press for granting permission to republish Ede’s final published essay. The essays by Michael Faris, Jessica Restaino, Asao Inoue, Vicki Tolar Burton, Ehren Pflugfelder, Tim Jensen, Kristy Kelly, Sarah Tinker Perrault, and Rachel Daugherty remind us, through their memories of Lisa Ede, what our work means: its purpose and significance. 

Rebecca Dingo, Co-Editor, articles 

I feel fortunate, that my first issue as co-editor follows the timely and powerful summer issue (Peitho 23.4) on “Race, Feminism, and Rhetoric” edited by Gwenolyn Pough and Stephanie Jones.  Although some of the essays for this Fall 2021 issue were already in the pipeline prior to me coming on as co-editor, it was my goal in editing this first issue’s articles to make sure that the powerful and challenging conversations, methods, and critical theories developed in the summer issue be taken up in our current issue. Indeed, I asked each of our article contributors—all of whom were in some way addressing race, geopolitics, nation, feminism, and rhetoric in their articles—to extend the conversation from the special summer issue. I felt it was important that the articles printed in this Fall 2021 issue reflect the vision that Pough and Jones assert: that feminist rhetorical scholarship must address the “ways that race, feminism and rhetoric intersect across time, in this moment, and around the world.” In this issue, I sought to extend their commitments, and their sentiment resonates strongly with my vision for the journal’s articles over my next four years as co-editor.  

I see the feminist study of rhetoric, composition, and communication to be at an interesting and important place. I believe that Peitho is poised to address the deep cultural tensions—around race, gendered violence, white supremacy, and imperialism that exist within the U.S., within the US’s complex transglobal relations, and often throughout the globe. These tensions make it necessary for feminist work to evolve and change. As the contributors from the “Race, Feminism, and Rhetoric” special issue make clear, feminist scholars must think about gender and race in “nuanced” (Jones and Pough), intersectional (Dziuba and Fain), “collaborative” (Browdy), and “contextually driven” (Plange) ways. Current events in the U.S. and across the world demonstrate quite readily that these scholars’ approaches (and more approaches!) are desperately needed in our field. For example, in the U.S., we continue to see blatant and deadly racism, sexism, and gendered violence at the hands of white people in power, which has fueled activist commitments to social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and MeToo. Yet, in broadening outside of the U.S., we are (hopefully) emerging from a global pandemic that has laid bare the deep racial, gendered, and geopolitical systematic inequalities that were (for those with privilege, at least) until then, more hidden. Beyond the pandemic, we are seeing the continued punishment and inhuman treatment of migrants as they seek to escape prosecution—Muslims in China, children at the US-Mexico border, Yemini and Syrians scattered throughout the Middle East and Europe (and other places), desperate migrants from the Middle East used as political pawns between Belarus and Poland, to name a few. Likewise, scholars and activists are now actively naming the structures of white supremacy that imbue all aspects of U.S. and global culture; at the same time, transnational feminist scholars, particularly U.S.-based Black scholars and women of color from the U.S. and Global South, have for a long time challenged all feminists to address how imperialism, settler colonialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberal political economies (e.g. Kaplan and Grewal, Lowe, Mohanty, Hong, Spivak, to name a few) thrive and persist through the rhetorical processes of racialization, gendering, and exclusion (see e.g. in our own field, Dingo, Orr, and Flores).  

These are the conversations that I believe ought to be at the forefront of Peitho; these are the approaches and topics I hope to forward during my time as co-editor overseeing article publication. While many feminist rhetorical scholars such as Aja Martinez, Strom Christine Pilloff, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, and Kyle Larson have already begun to take on these issues within Peitho and Peitho continues to extend its commitment to racial justice, more work needs to be done to identify the rhetorical patterns and processes that support intersecting structures of racism, white supremacy, ethnocentrism, heterosexism, gender, imperialism, and inequalities within political economies. I have been excited by the queer and decolonial feminist rhetorical scholarship Peitho has recently showcased that start to make these connections. Using a queer feminist lens, scholars such Rachel Presley and GPat Patterson and Leland G. Spencer importantly have re-imagined ways to decenter whiteness.  Similarly, Sophia Maier, V. Jo Hsu, Christina V Cedillo, & M. Remi Yergeau demonstrate the ways disability, imperialism, colonialism, and heteronormativity are fractally related. Yet, following scholars such a Lisa Flores, Lisa B. Y. Calvente, Bernadette Marie Calafell, and Karma R. Chávez, it is also time to begin examining critically the field of feminist rhetorical studies’ theoretical underpinnings, commitments, methods, and practices to account for its own raced, gendered, imperialist, and ethnocentric focus. As co-editor, in addition to displaying new work in already established areas, I would like to draw Peitho readership’s attention to new approaches in the field that address these sorts of structures of power. Indeed, I call for more work that draws attention to how rhetorics can shape (and re-shape), continue, structure, and expose systems of power.  

In this Fall 2021 issue, I asked for article contributors to name and site the places where knowledge-making specifically around race, feminism, and rhetoric was coming from and, as a result, readers will see the direct ways that the contributors have taken up the work of the summer issue. I deeply appreciate that the authors took up this challenge, and I hope that doing so sets the tone for the future of Peitho.  

Yet, I also want to highlight that each essay critically forwards new feminist methods and lenses that draw readers’ attention toward how white women’s relationships to intersectionality developed, how to engage in reparative historiography to highlight buried voices, how to consider rhetorical agency under settler colonialism and within a racist imperial system, and how neoliberal political economy limits, links, and asks for new feminist rhetorical practices and feminist rhetorical methods that attend to silences and bodies. For example, in the essay, “Ghostwriting for Racial Justice: On Barbara Johns, Dramatizations, and Speechwriting as Historical Fiction,” author Zosha Stuckey examines how reparative historiography methods can offer feminist scholars ways to recreate texts that have not been archived. Likewise, in “Rhetorical Failures and Revisions in the Second-Wave: Emerging Intersectionality in the Ethe of Activist Zelda Nordlinger,” Megan Busch considers how white women were reframing their feminist approaches to think about race and class in the 1970s, during the second wave U.S.-feminist movement. Much like Stucky’s essay in this issue, in “Indigenous Women’s Voices in the Colonial Records of South Africa: Asking for Permission,” authors Emily January Petersen and Breeanne Matheson search through colonial records in South Africa to see how indigenous women developed agency to survive and maintain their cultural practices (even when their direct voices were absent from archives) within a violent settler colonial system that thrives on racial hierarchies.  Working between the continents of Africa (specifically Uganda) and North America (specifically the U.S.), in the essay “Silently Speaking Bodies: Affective Rhetorical Resistance in Transnational Feminist Rhetoric,” author Ashley Canter considers how two groups of women from different locations and cultures used their bodies to protest when their voices were ignored in order to draw attention to environmental degradation in the local communities; in each case, women physically strip themselves of clothing or hair to draw attention to the destructive strength of neoliberal political economies and the resulting land loss. Taken together, these articles turn our attention to the various ways that feminist scholars can highlight individual rhetors while making visible the operations of rhetoric in both structuring and resisting the interconnected systems of structural racism, white supremacy, ethnocentrism, heterosexism, gender, imperialism, and inequalities within political economies.   I hope that you find these essays continue to grow and showcase the feminist commitments and spirit of our field.   

Clancy Ratliff, Co-Editor, Recoveries and Reconsiderations  

When I was in graduate school in the early 2000s, I did a fair amount of rabble-rousing online (in the early days of the blogosphere) in an effort to push the field of rhetoric and composition studies toward more online, open-access scholarly publishing. I and other graduate students from various universities would get together at conferences and proclaim that more senior scholars needed to be publishing in these journals so that they would have more prestige: in other words, using their privilege to support these journals. I am now trying to be the full professor I wanted to see in the world when I was a student. I have always read and valued Peitho, and I admire the Coalition’s forward-looking thought in transforming the Peitho newsletter into an open-access journal. I still believe in paywall-free scholarship and am grateful to have the opportunity to serve the discipline as co-editor of Peitho. Like Rebecca, the editorial team and I share the commitment to making Peitho a journal that centers intersectional and global feminisms and critiques caste systems in the United States and elsewhere (Wilkerson) and that respects the labor of authors, reviewers, and everyone else involved in the production of each issue. Rebecca and I have read and will be observing the practices in “Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors.” This statement of best practices is a vital guide for anyone involved in academic publication.  

My primary role as co-editor is working with the Recoveries and Reconsiderations section of the journal. The CFSHRC announced this new feature in 2019, envisioning it as a space for shorter pieces of scholarship that may engage new and emerging developments in feminisms and rhetorics, or that provide some initial analysis of archival materials, or a new perspective on an old topic. Recoveries and Reconsiderations is a space for starting new conversations in feminist studies.  

This issue features three Recoveries and Reconsiderations essays. Taken together, these articles illustrate the complexity of the kyriarchy (as Rachel Presley has used the term), the simultaneity of workings of power, and the ways that people struggle against some aspects of systems of laws, norms, and practices while benefiting from other aspects. Mary Le Rouge’s essay “Research on the Literate Practices of Field Matrons on the Hopi Reservation” is a vivid example; Le Rouge writes about one of her ancestors, her great-great-grandmother, who was a field matron on the Hopi reservation. The field matron program was one of many functions of settler colonialism: white women were hired to go into Indigenous people’s homes and teach Indigenous women how to keep house like white settler women. This program served to erase Indigenous foodways and medical knowledge, among other traditions, and field matrons also played a role in the removal of Indigenous children from their homes and placement in violent boarding schools. Le Rouge explains that this is a program that she has directly benefited from, as her great-great-grandmother was able to support herself and her sons financially by doing this work. Le Rouge shows that white women in 2021 need to sit with the knowledge of this particular way that white women perpetuated settler colonialism. Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday’s article provides an examination of feminist coworking spaces. While perhaps the most well-known service for renting office space is WeWork, Fiscus-Cannaday investigates spaces that are specifically designed for women, like CAMPspace and The Riveter, and raises interesting questions about how space can be used rhetorically. Susan Ghiaciuc, Cathryn Molloy, and Vanessa Rouillon offer a notable reconsideration: S. Weir Mitchell was a physician who is remembered primarily for the restrictive “rest cure,” which served as containment for women experiencing emotional pain. The focus of Ghiaciuc, Molloy, and Rouillon’s work, however, is not Mitchell, but instead Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a feminist woman who wrote letters to Mitchell. They suggest that other men in history may have likewise been engaged in correspondence with women who challenged their views, and they encourage scholars to look for these kinds of archival materials.  

Future Plans 

We, the incoming editorial team, bring new ideas to Peitho, and we welcome feedback on these ideas as well as other new ideas. We are interested in using Creative Commons licensing for articles as a way to concretize our commitment to open access publication. Creative Commons licensing is a way to grant permissions in advance, such as permission for an author to put a copy of their Peitho article in their university’s institutional repository of scholarship, as some universities require or encourage faculty to do. Some versions of Creative Commons licenses also allow readers to create derivative works of articles, such as a graphic novel version of an article or an audio recording, which increases accessibility. The image used for the cover of this fall’s issue is a Creative Commons licensed photograph taken by NASA, titled “Sunrise from the International Space Station,” and its license allows use of the photograph as long as the original source is attributed and the derivative work (our cover, in this case) is for noncommercial use. We are experimenting with audio recordings of articles, and we hope to release these eventually. We are also including image descriptions in the captions of images in our articles; in doing so, we want to help normalize this practice. As we begin our term as editors, we welcome inquiries, recommendations, and ideas of all kinds, including ideas for clusters in future issues and topics for special issues. We hope you learn from the articles in this issue and that they prove to be generative, inspiring response and continued thinking and acting within your communities.  

Works Cited 

Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors. 2021. tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic. Accessed 23 Nov. 2021. 

Browdy, Ronisha. “Black Women’s Rhetoric(s): A Conversation Starter for Naming and Claiming a Field of Study.” Peitho, vol. 23, no 4, Summer 2021. 

Calvente, L, Bernadette Marie Calafell & Karma R. Chávez (2020) Here is something you can’t understand: the suffocating whiteness of communication studies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 17:2, 202-209. 

Chávez, Karma R. “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 101, no. 1, Feb. 2015, pp. 162-172.  

Dingo, Rebecca. “Speaking well: The benevolent public and rhetorical production of neoliberal political economy.” Communication and the Public, vol. 3, no. 3, 2018, pp. 232–246. 

Dziuba, Allison. “We Want to Be Intersectional”: Asian American College Students’ Extracurricular Rhetorical Education.” Peitho, vol. 23, no 4, Summer 2021. 

Fain, Kimberly. “Black Feminist Rhetoric in Beyoncé’s Homecoming.” Peitho, vol. 23, no 4, Summer 2021. 

Flores, Lisa A. Deportable and Disposable. The Penn State UP, 2021. Print. 

Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. “Transnational Feminism Cultural Studies: Beyond the Marism/Postsrtucturalism/Feminism Divides.” Between Women and Nation. Vol. 2. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 430-45. Print. 

Hong, Grace. “Existentially Surplus: Women of Color Feminism and the New Crisis of Capitalism.” GLQ , vol. 18, no. 1, 2011, pp. 87 – 103. 

Larson, Kyle. “Remonstrative Agitation as Feminist Counterpublic Rhetoric.” Peitho, vol 20, no. 2, Spring/Summer 2018. 

LeMesurier, Jennifer Lin “Searching for Unseen Metic Labor in the Pussyhat Project.” Peitho, volume 22, no. 1, Fall/Winter 2019. 

Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke UP, 2015. Print. 

Maier, Sophia, V. Jo Hsu, Christina V Cedillo, and M. Remi Yergeau. “GET THE FRAC IN! Or, The Fractal Many-festo: A (Trans)(Crip)t.” Peitho, vol. 22, no. 4, Summer 2020. 

Martinez, Aja Y. “The Responsibility of Privilege: A Critical Race Counterstory Conversation.” Peitho. Vol. 21, no. 1, Fall/Winter 2018. 

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. ““Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 28.2 (2003): 499-535.  

NASA Johnson. “Sunrise from the International Space Station.” www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/29185510223. Accessed 23 Nov. 2021. 

Ore, Ersula J. Lynching: Violence, Rheotric, and American Identity. U Mississippi Press, 2019. Print. 

Patterson, GPat and Leland G. Spencer. “Toward Trans Rhetorical Agency: A Critical Analysis of Trans Topics in Rhetoric and Composition and Communication Scholarship.” Peitho, vol. 22, no. 4, Summer 2020. 

Pilloff, Storm Christine. “Métis and Rhetorically Listening to #BlackLivesMatter.” Peitho, vol. 23, no. 1, Fall 2020. 

Pough, Gwendolyn and Stephanie Jones, “On Race, Feminism, and Rhetoric: An Introductory/Manifesto Flow…” Peitho, vol. 23, no 4, Summer 2021. 

Presley, Rachel. “Toward a Trans Sovereignty: Why We Need Indigenous Rhetorics to Decolonize Gender and Sexuality.” Peitho, vol. 22, no. 4, Summer 2020. 

Spivak, Gayatri.  A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard UP, 1999. Print. 

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, 2020. Print. 

Research on the Literate Practices of Field Matrons on the Hopi Reservation

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Figure 1: “View of lower village road” (Idella Hahn) with her shadow c. 1913-14. Image description: a wide shot of flat land with short shrubs. In the foreground is a shadow of a woman in a long dress.

This is a research story about my great-great grandmother, who was a field matron on the Hopi reservation in the early 1900s. The field matron program was part of the colonial project that the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs instituted to culturally assimilate Indigenous peoples. Other such programs included native children’s forced attendance at boarding schools, the reservation system itself that supported landholding and property concepts, and farming/employment programs that disrupted traditional activities and lifeways. Although government intentions were framed as benevolent in public discourse, and some employees who implemented these programs might have believed that their actions were coming from the best intentions, the effect that they had was to destroy native culture. This colonial project served to support the dominance of white culture in the United States, which benefits white people such as myself to this day. I am a white female scholar, writing about my white female ancestor and her relationship with the Hopi people she worked with on the reservation. I feel obligated to tell this story because I feel that such destructive governmental programs should not be allowed to exist – that if the history of the field matron program is forgotten, it could be repeated, and that if there is any chance for restitution and reconciliation with Indigenous people, it is important to have this conversation.   

I grew up hearing fantastic stories about my great-great grandmother Idella Senour Hahn (1869-1969), who worked as a field matron on the Hopi reservation in Arizona in the early 1900s. She left her midwestern home in Bourbon, Indiana, after the untimely death of her husband Daniel Hahn from tuberculosis on May 9, 1909, and the death of her mother Sophia Baylor one year later. Idella had two young sons, 13-year-old Harold and 10-year-old Donald. They moved west to Dickinson, North Dakota, where Idella’s brother George A. Senour lived. Idella supposedly inherited land there, but her sons were too young to work the farm. She also was trained to give music lessons and thought of opening a music store, but there was not much interest in music in the rural town. 

Figure 2: Idella Hahn c. 1913. Image description: a headshot of Idella Hahn, who would have been in her mid-40s. She has short curly hair and is dressed in a white blouse with a dark bow at the throat. She is looking directly into the camera with a serious expression.

So, her brother recommended that she seek work with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as the Sioux and Mandan Indians had settlements nearby. She passed the Civil Service Field Matron Examination on September 10, 1913, which included home economics subjects such as “keeping accounts,” “elementary sewing,” “cooking and general household management,” “sanitation, hygiene, care of the sick, care and feeding of children,” “home gardening and poultry raising,” and “methods of social work” (U.S. Civil Service Commission). She hoped to be assigned work nearby in North Dakota, but she was instead given a post at the Moqui[1]  Agency at Stearns Canyon, Arizona, and she was notified that “This Agency is remote from the Railroad and there are no school facilities for your sons,” despite the fact that there was a school on the reservation for the Hopis, which was not considered suitable for her children (U.S. Dept. of the Interior, “Education – Appointments”). Idella would be paid $660 a year (which was equivalent to about $18,000 in 2021 purchasing power), but she was responsible for paying her own way to the reservation, which would include travel by train, car, and then buckboard or stagecoach (U.S. Dept. of the Interior, “Education – Employees”). 

When my family would tell her story, they would bring out an old photo album, newspaper clippings, and other documents that gave evidence and context to Idella’s life. They had a box of Indian artifacts that Idella had collected, either given to her as gifts (as I was told) or purchased, including moccasins, a braided rug, and woven baskets. Idella donated many pieces to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History after it was founded in 1920. My family sold some of the pieces when I was a child, but some are still in boxes in my possession or stored by other family members. I considered donating the items that I had to the natural history museum, some arrowheads and a rug, but then learned about the Hopi reclamation efforts, especially of kachina dolls, from museums around the country and world when I visited the Hopi reservation. The repatriation of such artifacts is important to the Hopi people, and so returning them to the ancestors of the people who made them is a step toward restoration of Indigenous sovereignty. 

My family also had essays that Idella had written about the Hopi snake dance, the naming of a Hopi baby, and her “Plea for the Indian” that sought the right for the Hopi to continue their dances and cultural practices (Hahn, “Description,” “The Naming,” and “Plea”). My family characterized her work by claiming that “she was a teacher” on the reservation, or that “she taught at a school” there. They also said that she wrote one of the first Hopi-English dictionaries, and that it was kept in the Library of Congress or records of the Bureau of the Interior[2]. These artifacts and stories made me curious about Idella’s life and work. 

When I decided to write a biography of Idella Hahn in 2015 and started researching the field matrons and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, I found a very different view of their work in the history books. Field matrons were employed by the U.S. government to conduct the cultural assimilation of Native American women (Emmerich “Right in the Midst,” “Marguerite Laflesche Diddock”; Simonsen “‘Object Lessons,’” “Making Home Work”). They were supposed to help improve sanitary conditions and aid in medical matters, but most were not nurses. They taught Native American women how to cook, clean, sew, and act like American farm women (Bryson & Hansen). Field matrons were not formally trained, but instead brought their own understanding of their role to the job and received guidance from “circulars” and letters sent from their supervisors. The program, although ostensibly acting as a form of social work to aid Indigenous peoples, resulted in the further destruction of native culture (after their land was taken and they were moved onto reservations) and created a rift between native women and their communities. For almost 50 years, mostly white field matrons were sent to Indian reservations around the country in the hopes that by assimilating native women in the home through normative domestic practices, native children and the community would also be more easily assimilated. 

Field matrons were the embodiment of the program created by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to help solve the Indian “problem,” having direct contact with the targeted population, and so their writings provide a window into the moral struggle that they must have felt when they became the instrument of forced assimilation. They joined the service with a Christian missionary spirit to help and “civilize” tribal women, but when they realized the results of their work, and saw the hardships and reality of life on the reservation for Native women, many quickly left their job (Hancock, Trennert, Wunder). This was considered “women’s work,” with field matrons primarily focused on Native women’s housekeeping, childbirth, and health care practices. Not all the work that field matrons did was bad for Indigenous people – they helped take care of sick family members, assisted in childbirth, and showed Native women ways that their handiwork could improve their homes and provide extra income for their families. Some features of this education would have been useful to women who wanted to assimilate to dominant white settler ways of life. However, the forced nature of this education on Indigenous women was unethical. How field matrons’ writings changed over time, during their tenure on the reservation, shows an evolving understanding of their purpose and the role set out by the government. The changing focus of correspondence between field matrons and their supervisors over time also shows the development of the program’s goals and ultimately its discontinuation in favor of providing general nursing assistance. 

Representing Indigenous versus Assimilating Rhetoric 

U.S. government policy, as enacted by field matrons, forced Native women against their will to accept the dominant culture and ways of acting. However, as Scott Lyons asks, “What do Indians want from writing?” He says, rhetorical sovereignty: “the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit, to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse (449–450). He shows this by relating the history of Native American use of rhetorical sovereignty to create laws and treaties to govern their lands and claims that one “pillar of sovereignty” is self-government (457). This is important because “Indigenous people … may constitute the world’s most adamant refusal of current expansions of global capitalism and imperialism that plagues many and benefit so few” (462). He calls for prioritization of the study of American Indian rhetoric (and that of other minorities) in curriculum, including their treaties and laws, both historical and contemporary, with an eye toward social change. 

Malea Powell asks how Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and Charles Alexander Eastman, two Native Americans, used language to survive and resist colonialization. The problem, she sees, is the “Western Eurocentric focus of the American academy” (“Rhetorics of Survivance” 398). She calls for an “imaginative liberation of indigenous peoples from the stories being told about them that insist on nobility or ignobility, that cannot afford to see Indian peoples as humans” (399). She answers her question by giving some historical background and “critically engaging with Native texts,” two memoirs written respectively by Hopkins and Eastman: Life Among the Piutes (1883) and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916). Powell states that “I pay close attention to the language of survivance (survival + resistance) that they, consciously or unconsciously, use in order to reimagine and, literally, reconfigure “the Indian” (400). She says that “my hope is that we can begin to reimagine ourselves, our pedagogies, our scholarship, our discipline in relation to a long and sordid history of American imperialism (428). Powell seeks a critical reimagining of the field of rhetoric and composition to right the colonial wrongs that have been done to many peoples. 

Alanna Frost asks how Dakelh (British Columbia, Canada, Native Americans) literacy practices can inform the field of rhetoric and composition. She studies the lifework of two prominent Dakelh “literacy stewards,” Mary John and Doreen Patrick, includes a brief history, and comments on their practices in their communities. Frost states, “This term, literacy steward, can be applied to any individual who demonstrates persistent dedication to the practice or promotion of a literacy considered traditionally important to his or her community (56). She uses the term steward instead of Brandt’s sponsorship because with sponsorship, a “dependence on funding sources has implications for how and when cultural composing happens” (56) and is limited by the sponsor’s agenda and is market-based. She finds that the “Dakelh use of memory-in-place offers an example of alternative ontologies that directly relate to literacy practices with which community members engage during public and private affairs” (61) in a traditional survivance practice. Literacy stewards are interested in the grassroots development of noncommodified resources. 

Malea Powell also writes about Susan La Flesche Picotte (Omaha), asking how Native Americans have used language to navigate relationships with European Americans. She answers this question by recounting history and evaluating La Flesche’s writing, stating that “La Flesche’s way of dealing with European Americans … is, for me, powerfully persuasive evidence of the alliance and adaptation tactics some Native people engaged in … (“Down by the River, 49). Powell takes up the term primacy, or status given to “official” (dominant) viewpoints in relation to the devalued “practices of the everyday, and the knowledge of those who function in this context” (Royster & Williams qtd. in Powell 42). She believes that learning about La Flesche’s literary tactics can help rhetoric and composition scholars form an alliance against the “prime” narrative of Western Eurocentric ideology. 

These scholars study the rhetoric of Indigenous authors to define their methods of resisting colonization by European Americans. They make these Native people’s lives visible and reproduce the meanings of their texts to both preserve the history of their culture and add to the field of rhetoric and composition’s knowledge base. In the discipline of literacy, rhetoric, and composition and academia in general, minorities have not been well represented, and their cultural practices have not been as valued in research and pedagogy. In the struggle to address Western ethnocentrism, gender bias, and ableism, there have been recent moves to recover minority and non-Western writings from the archives that were not previously noted or recorded (Wu, Takayoshi). In a feminist methodological response to erasure of women’s experience from the archives, I am recovering the experiences of these field matrons and bringing them to light. I hope that study of the writings of field matrons will lead to greater understanding of assimilation processes in society so that they can be dismantled and avoided. 

Feminism in the Archives 

Feminist methodology is central to this type of research, and there are certain aspects of this broad methodology to unpack (Enoch and Bessette; Bizzell). First, is the epistemological stance of studying women’s history. The researcher wants to bring greater historical context and coverage to the history of women; therefore, the choice of the subject of study reflects this focus. This is the systematic recovery of historical information that would otherwise go untold or become lost in the archives. This research also helps tell the story of field matrons’ relations with Indigenous peoples and the Hopi tribe, a group that has experienced systematic discrimination from the U.S. government. Therefore, the site of research is also reflective of a focus on a marginalized population living on the fringes of U.S. society. 

Taking this feminist methodology also means acknowledging the role that participants play in developing the knowledge that is obtained from the research and including them in the interpretation of the data (Powell and Takayoshi). Anything that is learned should be reciprocally shared with participants and the researcher should do whatever is possible to return the favor of their time and effort on the project. It is also imperative to be self-reflexive—keenly aware of personal biases and background in the understanding of events from the past and how the researcher’s status as influenced by their identity plays into their research design, data collection, and evaluation of results. This can be done by reflectively analyzing interpretations critically for faults in logic because of misconceptions or assumptions (Kirsch and Rohan). 

This methodology is also generative, where one piece of information will lead to another important piece of the puzzle, because rebuilding historical information is a constructivist process. The meaning of events from the past can only be understood through the contextualization of social situations from history, but these are also negotiated by present-day ideologies in the representation of knowledge (Cushman, Gaillet, Gold). This methodology takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining rhetoric and composition, archival historical research, sociology, and ethnography. 

The Journey

I started out collecting information about Idella Hahn from my family, and then I looked to external sources. First, I traveled to Bourbon, Indiana, and Chicago in February 2016 to see where Idella grew up and went to school. Then, I traveled to the Hopi reservation that March, where I spent 5 days tracing the steps of my great-great grandmother and visited the places she had likely been, locating scenery in photographs that she had taken and speaking with residents. I wanted to get a sense of what it must have been like for her to move all the way from Indiana to Arizona, leave her children behind, and work with Native people. I had contacted the Hopi Office of Cultural Preservation to ask the tribe for their permission to use my great-great grandmothers’ writings and photos about life on the reservation in the biography. I was invited to meet with legal researcher at the Office of Cultural Preservation Terry Morgart, on the reservation in Arizona, where I also met the Hopi archivist and ethnohistorian Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, who agreed that the project should proceed, and that they would be willing to work with me on it[1].

Figure 3: “My house Oraibi” (Idella Hahn) c. 1913-14. Image description: a long, one-story ranch style house seen from far away on flat land with a fence and a line of trees in front. On the left is another structure: another house or a barn. In front of the fence are three adult women and a child.

I had many questions about ethics to consider because they did not want my research to impinge on their cultural privacy. The Hopis do not allow photography on their reservation, and they informed me that some of the ceremonies described in Idella’s essays were not usually open to outsiders. Some of the ceremonies described in her writings were not appropriate for Hopi children to read about until they were adults. In addition, I could not speak reliably about their culture while in the process of writing the biography of a field matron because I am not a Hopi. So, I asked Mr. Koyiyumptewa to work collaboratively with me on the project on sensitive cultural issues. He asked in return if I would share my photographs with him, and so I gave him a USB drive with digital copies of all the photographs that Idella had taken and the notes that she had written on them about location and date. I also offered to give 10% of any proceeds if the biography was published to the Hopi Education Endowment Fund, which Mr. Koyiyumptewa found to my surprise is still housed in a building that existed near where Idella lived on the reservation.[3] 

Figure 4: “Looking north view from my front gate. The Drs. house. I made an X on the sheep corral up on the side of the hill. It is quite steep” (Idella Hahn) c. 1913-14. Image description: a small one-story house with a large rock formation behind the house in the background.

In my search for archival records, I was told that most of the historical documents about the Hopi reservation that would have been kept at the local Keams Canyon office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs had been moved to the National Archives at Riverside, California. There were some documents available at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, so I traveled there to read correspondence between the superintendent dated around 1906–09 (Moqui Indian Agency [Ariz.]). These documents show how schoolteacher Elizabeth Stanley and field matron Miltona Keith acted as intermediaries to try and defuse the “trouble” at Oraibi, when the government forced parents to send children in the village to a boarding school and caused a split between parents who agreed to send their children (called “friendlies”), and those who refused (“unfriendlies” or “hostiles”). There was an armed uprising, during which many Hopis were captured and imprisoned on Alcatraz Island. The event caused a split in the community, with the unfriendlies moving to the nearby town of Hotevilla in the canyon, and the friendlies staying in Oraibi. Stanley says in her report to Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis E. Leupp, “My school is nearly all over in the Hostile camp. I am thinking of turning hostile myself, and then maybe you will put me with them. It is hard to give them all up but I hope to stay at Oraibi.” History books that describe these events (of which there are not many) do not usually discuss the role that these women played. This split in the community still existed when Idella arrived in Oraibi in 1914. 

In 2019, I traveled to the National Archives in Riverside, California, after receiving funding through a Graduate Student Research Award from Kent State University. I digitized the correspondence of several field matrons and documents pertaining to their service in the early 1900s (U.S. National Archives “75.4 General Records,” “75.19.46 Records”). The documents that I collected at the National Archives are the official records of their field reports and the journals and correspondence with their supervisors. These are called “Circulars” because some of the messages were circulated throughout the reservations toward the management of operations by the Superintendent in charge. They show a progressive professionalization of the field matron job through imposition of a uniform (that each field matron had to sew out of bolts of fabric provided by the BIA), an increasing number of circulars describing how they should do their jobs, and training programs provided at weeklong conferences across the west. On the reservation, there was no running water and “traditional” white settler ways of farming and crops were forced on a land that could not sustain it. This greatly reduced the community’s food sovereignty, which put stress on the reservation’s ability to feed its people independently, and resulted in further dependence on government assistance through supplemental food rationing (Wilbur, “Food Sovereignty”). There is mention of how the field matrons should keep track of Hopi births and deaths, a pamphlet called “Indian Babies – How to Keep Them Well” (1916), and correspondence about a “baby contest” meant to showcase their work with Hopi mothers that had to be canceled last minute because of an outbreak of disease on the reservation. The difficulties of various epidemics and World War I are evident from circulars that describe food shortages, prescribe quarantine procedures, and institute a ban on the government employment of U.S. citizens with German heritage in 1917. 

Although Idella did not have a German background, her husband’s family did, so because of her husband’s last name that she still carried (Hahn) she was forced to resign her duties in 1918. This was particularly ironic because both of her sons served in World War I, and her job as a cultural assimilator ended because her personal cultural heritage was invalidated by the very government that had hired her. As recorded on her “Efficiency Report” dated April 25, 1918: 

Mrs. Hahn apparently is loosing [sic] interest, evidently largely due to the fact that she expects to leave the service on or before the coming July 1st. She has two sons in the America [sic] army, now in France. She is American, regrets the handicap, as she expresses it, her German name, her deceased husband having been a German. (Nat. Archives at St. Louis) 

It is now 2021, and I feel that having just lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, I have even greater empathy for my great-grandmother’s loss of her husband to tuberculosis, the difficulties dealing with epidemics on the reservations, and how she patented a design for burial clothes in 1940. Before this year, I thought the last fact strange, but now I can see how there would be a need for this, especially living through the last great influenza pandemic and between the two world wars. I hope that over time, I will develop an even greater understanding of what her life was like and what it means. 

In contemporary society, there are a multitude of social service programs that intrude on the home life and privacy of citizens, especially for those who receive government assistance. These types of intrusions, especially regarding medical health tracking, have become increasingly common through modern technological advancements for people at all socioeconomic levels of society. While there are no more field matrons sent out to assimilate people in the United States, many Native people who live on reservations still receive government assistance and social services, and experience high poverty rates. Understanding how intrusive government policies become normalized in historical women’s discourse will help reveal the process of policy formation and social norm formation so that such invasive and damaging programs can be dismantled and avoided in the future. 

Questions

How did American women who worked as field matrons for the Bureau of Indian Affairs react to the colonizing forces of their job assignments? What did the field matrons experience on the job, and how did they justify their work to themselves and their superiors? How did they reconcile the underlying ideology of ethnocentricity with the purported aims of improving living conditions of Hopis on the reservation? 

What are the ethics of working with archives of groups that the researcher is not a part of? What are the ethical practices for working with culturally sensitive materials? How do we approach working with rhetorical materials that may represent oppressive/colonialist views, especially when the author might be perceived as sharing the same cultural/racial identity as the colonizers? 

In what ways does the recovery of women’s writing from the archives change the cultural memory of historical events and social processes? Aside from increasing the perceived value of women’s writings and traditionally feminine topics, does a contemporary change in ideology that increasingly values women’s work also call for an adjustment in the historical record? Or does it simply fill in the gaps where knowledge was missing, to reinforce history as it is already understood? 

How can family stories and histories, passed down from generation to generation, add to our shared cultural heritage and understanding of history writ large? The genre is usually viewed as subjective and potentially inaccurate, but when women’s stories are so often erased from the written record, family lore is an important way to transmit historical information about women. How can accuracy be ensured, or at least attempted, in the changing oral stories of family members?

Endnotes 

[1]The word Moqui was originally used by the Spanish to denote the Hopi people, but the word came to be pronounced in a way that means “dead” in the Hopi language, and is therefore seen as derogatory by the Hopi, although it was used by the U.S. Department of the Interior to refer to the Hopi until 1930.

[2] I have been unable to find a copy of, or official reference to, this dictionary. It is possible that it was redacted from government records because of the use of the Navajo language (which is similar in etymology to Hopi) as a secret code during World War II.

[3] Special thanks to Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa for reviewing this article for accuracy and cultural sensitivity before publication. 

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The Last Time We Saw Lisa

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In the spirit of collaboration, which was one of Lisa’s gifts to us and to our discipline, this piece was written collaboratively by those who were there:  

Vicki Tolar Burton, Tim Jensen, Kristy Kelly, Sarah Tinker Perrault, Ehren Pflugfelder 

August 18, 2021, a perfect Oregon summer afternoon, six of us gathered under a huge oak tree in Cloverland Park, near the Oregon State University (OSU) campus in Corvallis. Fully vaccinated, in a socially distanced circle, we sat in our camp chairs (Tim lounged on the grass)—unmasked and happy to see each other’s faces again. Lisa’s husband, the artist Greg Pharr, brought Lisa, helping her navigate her walker over tree roots to join the circle. Kristy recalls that Greg treated Lisa like an absolute queen, ushering her out to the group, setting up her chair, clearly enjoying the adulation she was receiving from us. Greg took off for a coffee shop to look at sketches, as Lisa told us about a bad fall early in the summer that made walking still a challenge. But physical therapy was helping, she said with good spirit.  

This was the rhetoric group from the OSU School of Writing, Literature and Film, a group so congenial that every meeting, every gathering feels like a gift, and has for many years. We were Lisa’s home team, her teaching colleagues and friends. Lisa made it a point to get to know even those rhetoric faculty hired after she retired. Our rhetoric group coordinator, Ehren Pflugfelder, kindly included retirees like Lisa (2014) and me (2020) in the gathering. Rounding out the circle were Kristy Kelly, Sarah Tinker Perrault, and Tim Jensen. Lisa expressed regret at not seeing Chris Anderson and Ana Ribero, who were unable to come.  As usual, Lisa was interested in how everyone was doing—she was quick to ask about spouses and colleagues who weren’t in attendance, send her regards, and wish them all well. It was in her character to think about community and connections, first and foremost, recalls Tim.  

Sarah remembers us talking, with great humor, about Lisa’s cat Leo, the squirrel hunter. Lisa told us he’s not a lap cat but is loving in his own way, albeit a somewhat distressing way when he brings them fully grown dead squirrels.  

We briefly discussed Covid, OSU’s imminent return to face-to-face (masks required), fully vaccinated classrooms, and expressed concern for the challenges that incoming freshmen and sophomores face. Lisa shared memories of the OSU writing center’s founder, a woman who lived a stone’s throw from where we sat. Ehren remembers that as Kristy and Sarah described a workshop both were attending that week on anti-racist teaching, Lisa provided institutional context, including an empathetic reminder of the struggles the workshop leader had as a faculty member of color at a largely white institution in the ‘90s and forward. Lisa, ever our mentor, saw the complexity in people and situations. She congratulated and was encouraging to those in the circle starting new roles, naming their gifts: Kristy as Interim Director of First Year Writing, and Tim as Interim Director of the School.  

My (Vicki’s) primary memory of the day was joy at seeing Lisa and witnessing how happy the gathering made her. Lisa and I had talked on the phone and emailed through Covid and the summer, but had not seen each other in person for a long time, even when Greg called me to come out and share their garden’s bounty. Being there in the rhetoric circle seemed to energize Lisa and delight her.  

That golden afternoon, Lisa was very much her kind, supportive, and engaging self. She told stories of family and growing up in Ohio in a family of eleven children. Expressing gratitude to Greg for making her come, she said she wanted to be invited again. Everyone wanted to be invited again. We are all so grateful for that August afternoon. It all felt rather charmed—like the universe conspired so that we could see her this last time. We miss you, Lisa. It was a gift and an honor to be your colleagues and your friends. 

A Letter to Lisa Ede: Thank You for a Life of Listening

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Dear Lisa,  

 I know it may seem odd or a belated gesture to write a letter to you after you’ve died, but it’s the only way I know how to express my feelings. You are my real audience, or the one I wish not simply to “invoke” or even “address” but to conjure back into real existence, to bring back for all our sakes. I know, that’s impossible. So I suppose this is also a way for me to say goodbye.  

As you know, you were my first Rhetoric and Composition teacher in grad school. That’s back in the early 1990s. During my first quarter as a new M.A. student at Oregon State University, I took your advanced composition course that had a pretty heavy dose of composition theory in it, as I recall. I don’t remember a lot about the course, except for a group project about language and discourse communities. But that’s not what I want to talk about exactly. 

I want to thank you for the kind of teacher you were in that course and the kind of woman you still are for me in memory. I look back today and realize that there was a teacher-lesson for me to learn in your class, but I wouldn’t really learn that lesson until maybe a decade or so later. I don’t remember any lectures, nor do I recall you saying a lot in class, although I’m sure you did. What I recall is that we had lots of activities that filled that room in Moreland Hall. I remember my colleagues, our writing things together in class. I remember reading each other’s drafts, and the project on discourse communities. I remember the feeling of doing work together as you watched on. I also remember coming to your office to complain about my group members, and you sitting listening to me at your wooden desk that seemed too small for such an important professor—who has a wooden desk anymore anyway? Today, about thirty years later, I’m still learning the lesson. The teacher-lesson is pretty simple: step back and let your students labor through their learning. Listen more than you talk. 

Today if I were in front of a group of TAs, I might say something like this: The more you talk in front of your students in class, the less they are learning. But as a teacher, not talking ain’t always listening. And of course, there has to be a balance. We teachers have things to say, as you did to us, to me, Lisa. But the balance is easy to get wrong. It’s easy to be pedagogically “cattywampus,” to use a word my mom would say, another woman who taught me a lot about words spoken and swallowed.   

A scene a few years after finishing my M.A. I’m still in Oregon. I’ve not yet begun my doctoral work at Washington State. Kelly (my wife) and I are in the feed store on the south end of Corvallis. The store isn’t there anymore. We are trying to buy dog food for our Labrador, Boomer. I hadn’t seen you in a few years, but you walked right up to us, gave both of us a hug. You’d probably only met Kelly two or three times, maybe it was a department party or get-together. You said, “How are you doing?” Then you turned to Kelly and asked, “and how are you doing?”  

Then you listened to us. I know this part because mostly what I remember about that 10-minute visit in the feed store is that you stood in the aisle with us as we talked about our new dog Boomer, our life in Monmouth, my job as a technical writer. And you seemed genuinely interested, interested in us, in our excitement about the new dog, in my job that I’d leave a year later to teach at a community college in Salem.  

This is what I remember about you. You were always interested and listening. And this obvious teacher-lesson seems so clear now, yet difficult to follow when there’s stuff to cover in a course or things to get done before the end of the hour. What I know you understood, Lisa, is that listening takes time, time we are usually short of in writing classes, humble patience, a habit we often forget about because we think we know what’s best for our students, and compassion, a practice that always gives both ways but doesn’t always feel like it on the front end. It seems when we aren’t thinking about it, which is often for me as a teacher, there doesn’t seem time to just listen in the deeply humble, patient, and compassionate way I remember you inhabiting. 

Another scene. We are at CCCC, again Kelly and I. It’s years later. I don’t remember which year but I’m not a grad student. I’m a professor somewhere, maybe it is during my time at Fresno State. I’m trying to make my way down the hall to an engagement. Kelly is gently nudging me, her sign that I’ll be late if I don’t move along. She is our clock-watcher, and I’m grateful for it. But there are several folks around me, asking me questions, talking to me. Clearly they are interested in my research and my ideas. I’m enjoying the attention, and as usual I get lost in the conversation, perhaps a little drunk off of the attention from others, their questions and admiration.  

Out of the corner of my eye, I see you standing there patiently, waiting, smiling. I’m pretty sure you want to talk to me, just say hi. You are maybe five or six feet behind the semi-circle of people around me. You are smiling and listening. And in that moment, I feel really joyful, or maybe I just feel seen-ly appreciated, noticed in a deep historical way, a way only someone who knew me as a first-year grad student complaining at the edge of her small wooden desk could see me and appreciate. Or maybe it’s my sense of full-circle-ness that I still can’t quite describe. I know I’m rehearsing in my head a narrative that likely isn’t fully true. The student goes out into the profession while the teacher watches with a smile just five or six feet away. A narrative of validation, yes, but also a narrative of a listener who validates. 

Another moment with you. Several years after that CCCC, I invite you to my writing program to give a workshop. After the workshop, we have dinner together at a really nice restaurant. You bring Greg, your husband, whom I know. I bring Kelly. We all know each other, have for years, of course. It’s a really nice evening. It’s a few years before COVID and it is the last time I see you in person, have dinner with you, talk about mundane things like what you’re planting in your yard or our pets or what painting Greg has just completed. We don’t talk about composition or business at dinner. We just talk about nothing that now feels like everything.  

I’m glad that was the last dinner I had with you, Lisa, and I’m disappointed that I don’t get to have another one with you.  

My experiences of you, Lisa, is that you were so human, so kind, so thoughtful, and always you listened. In my memories, which are not copious but not so few that I have a difficult time conjuring any, you are always listening. Maybe even now, you listen. Maybe if we’re lucky enough, we all can listen a small bit of you into our teaching lives.  

I imagine that in your life, both professional and personal, you had to cultivate a disposition toward listening, even as you should have been listened to more often. I imagine that it must have been frustrating to have to listen in rooms that should have listened to you, at OSU, at CCCC, at home, in feed stores, and in restaurants. Sure, you have been lauded and celebrated, as you should be, but I wonder how many have really listened to you in the ways you taught me?  

When I look at the wonderful pictures of you taken at different periods in your life that Greg and others have posted on social media in your honor, remembering you, I cannot help but see a woman patiently waiting and listening, smiling as she compassionately holds her tongue and opens her ears. I don’t know how you did it for all those years, but I am grateful for it, for you, for your willingness to listen to me, to listen near me.  

In one sense— and I really do mean this, Lisa— you listened me into the professor and scholar I am now. You were not the only one, but you were the first one, and you continued to do that over the almost thirty years I knew you. Thank you, Lisa, for listening to me, to all of us.  

Peace to you my friend,  

 

Asao B. Inoue 

Deep Doldrums: On Loving (and Learning from) Lisa Ede

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Can scholars find ways to resist the tendency for taxonomies to totalize and to sever the connection between scholarly texts and materially embodied experiences? What if it were a common scholarly practice to read against the grain of—as well as with—taxonomies? (104)

– Ede, Situating Composition (2004)

If I walked out my front door right now, I would be 2,851 miles away from Lisa’s front door. Google Maps says it would take me 934 hours of walking to get there. I feel my big loss. I first reached out to Lisa as a young, untenured scholar seeking feedback on an essay that drew on her work. That turned into years of mentorship, which turned into a deep intergenerational friendship, which turned Lisa into one of the most present, steady voices in my adult life. Once we opened our initial conversation in writing, it just kept going. Indeed, I had just heard from her—I was just going to write her back—when she left this world suddenly on September 29. I thus want to write an enormously selfish piece that is all about how much I miss her. I owe her an email and this is just not fair. I also want to count, to label, to weigh. I searched my email and found over a thousand threads between us. Each thread contains multiple messages. Who knows how many, total? So many. There are probably even threads I’m missing that got lost along the way. That must count for something. That must get me closer, subtract from the miles I must walk to get to her door. Grief and loss teach us that there is no mercy in this game, no kid gloves with which to handle the absence of someone we love. I can walk but will never arrive. That’s the truth. What I hope to do in this space instead is to address something I think Lisa actually got wrong, to right it as best as I can, and, in so doing, to cast her deep intellect and her endless heart forward in ways I believe we collectively need right now.  

Here is a time Lisa was wrong: It was the 2015 Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, which was held at Arizona State that year. My beloved friend Jenn Fishman had been dragging around, from session to session, a bottle of gin she picked up from a local distillery on her drive to Tempe. Who would toast the conference with her? For a while she had almost no takers—the work of lugging this bottle was getting lonely—until Lisa leaned forward after dinner and said, mischievously, “Let’s try that gin.” We had done a panel together—Lisa and I; Jenn and Andrea Lunsford—about intergenerational conversations and longitudinal research. Lisa had recently retired from Oregon State and, as we sat around Jenn’s hotel room sipping the gin, gathered her most reflexive, humble self and said, “Grad students really shouldn’t still be reading my work.” We protested. We insisted yes, they should. Lisa shrugged. This was the natural course of things, she suggested. Deal with it, kids. The ways in which Lisa was wrong in this case are multiple, because Lisa too was multiple: she was steadfast in how settled she could be in herself, rooted to feeling and to place and to her many commitments; and yet she was just as steadfast in rethinking as a practice, a way of being, swimming against the current that first pushed her. She would tell a story to explain how she got to where she was. She had not ruled out changing her mind. Lisa seldom ended an email without a “P.S.” because an afterthought was always available to her. It is here at this juncture that Lisa–-the scholar, the teacher, and the person—is as necessary to our field as she ever was. I am calling her out.  

Lisa’s impulse to cross her own work off the canon of grad student reading lists, rash as Jenn and I found it, was rooted in her deep resistance to any sense that she or anyone had conceived of anything that might be somehow totalizing or immutable. She takes this up seriously in Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location (2004), a critical retrospective of the process movement’s theoretical permutations from “process,” to “social process,” to “post-process” and the ensuing scholarly battlegrounds that she finds largely useless “for those who teach the majority of our composition classes” (153). Of these terms she writes, “I want to emphasize that I see them as both overdetermined and incapable of a fixed definition” (85). This was, in Lisa, a practice of refusal that stretched from her intellect to her spirituality, and that delivered to those lucky to know her a complex person who would meet us squarely, consider us seriously with the full force of her attention. Andrea says it, I think, best in Writing Together: Collaboration in Theory and Practice (2012), a collection that catalogues their extensive intellectual partnership and deep friendship:  

What first impression did I have of you? What I remember is thinking how interesting you looked, how much—how should I say this—how much yourself. I wonder if you remember our first meeting—and if so, how you remember it. How I wish this moment were documented in some way, for looking back now I see that it marked a turning point in my intellectual and emotional life: here, I see so clearly now, was a friend (not to mention a coauthor) for life. (52) 

Andrea’s observation that Lisa was a good friend because she was first and foremost herself also illustrates how seriously Lisa took her role as audience. She was all at once paying attention to what you had to say, to how she responded to what you had to say, and also questioning her very response on the grounds that, well, you were you and she couldn’t possibly know all the permutations therein. From Lisa I learned to write in the margins of my students’ papers, “As a reader, I…” because Lisa responded this way to drafts of my writing and, with this one stroke, embodied the very claim in “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked,” coauthored with Andrea: “[because of] the complex reality to which the term audience refers and…its fluid, shifting role in the composing process, any discussion of audience which isolates it from the rest of the rhetorical situation or which radically overemphasizes or underemphasizes its function in relation to other rhetorical constraints is likely to oversimplify” (222). Enough with the sweeping gestures: it is poor scholarship, useless to good teaching, and far away from the diverse lives of real people. And as extraordinary as she was, Lisa was a real person.  

We need take only a short walk, then, to understand just how broken-hearted Lisa was over the violent failures of audience in our current sociopolitical moment. The yes-it-is/no-it-isn’t of our contemporary conversations have kept us ill (literally) and disconnected. Lisa described this once to me as the “deep doldrums” which, in her typical fashion, she quickly rethought: “I don’t even know where that word came from or if it is a word” (correspondence, 12/20/19). So, I looked it up. Lisa looked everything up (in fact when I moved to a new town I received an article from her about the history of my new town, complete with a block quotation featuring what she found most interesting in the piece). The first definition of “doldrums” was what I thought it was upon initially seeing the word. But the second definition, I wrote her, I liked best. From the National Ocean Service, the doldrums are made up by “a belt around the Earth extending approximately five degrees north and south of the equator. Here, the prevailing trade winds of the northern hemisphere blow to the southwest and collide with the southern hemisphere’s driving northeast trade winds” (NOS). What ensues is a kind of hot air pressure cooker that only “persistent bands of showers and storms” can eventually break. An unusual sort of air circulation emerges because of the intensity of the competing gusts, one that pushes air “in an upward direction” and thus generates “little surface wind.” For this reason, sailors “well know that the area can becalm sailing ships for weeks” (NOS). In other words, the forcefulness of the winds going in opposing directions results in little movement at all, stuck-ness, the doldrums.  

I am back to Lisa’s scholarship, this time 1995’s “Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism,” coauthored with Andrea and Cheryl Glenn. The violence and the impotence of subjective, argumentative force is what I feel—circulating in the air—as the core claim of this piece. They write:  

In the same way, we have much to gain by reexamining the traditional rhetorical drive toward closure, with its reliance on those structures that lead readers inevitably to an ending, that follow Aristotle’s advice that discourse must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In this regard, we also have much to gain by crisscrossing the borders of rhetoric and feminism, particularly in terms of long-standing feminist attempts to disrupt the linear orderliness of prose, to contain contradictions and anomalies, to resist closure. (289) 

Any notion that we have been clean in our linearity, that we might “lead readers inevitably” to much of anything (except the doldrums) is the stuff of fanciful, unilateral power trips, not actual movement. Nevertheless we often act recklessly while suspended in the doldrums, impatient and ineffective as we have become. I am not waxing theoretical here. My own public university, emboldened by a narrow economic claim (inspired by capitalism) that our administrators tied inexorably to the pandemic (which has proven wrong or at least far more complex as we have just welcomed our largest first-year undergraduate class to date) took the opportunity to gut five contracts for full-time, non-tenure-track faculty in first-year writing and to refuse to replace the lines of retirees. In our department of Writing Studies, which offers the largest general education program and thus touches more undergraduates than mostly any other at our public university, one where the majority of our undergraduates hail from historically marginalized groups, we now have just three tenured folks (of which I am one) and a shrinking crop of talented full-time faculty who wait and wonder if this is the year their contracts will not be renewed. We are teaching writing while perched on a sand bar of sorts, with over sixty percent of our classes taught by folks who are part-time and with most all—but for three of us—teaching with the sort of contractual insecurity and instability that could make articulating what I just have a danger to their very jobs. Such force—closure, the inevitability of the obvious ending, the singular solution—delivers us only a system that devours itself.  

I am trying to keep the faith about my university, a place I love deeply that is located where I am actually from (I grew up just a town over, how unusual for an academic). We started this academic year with a new university president and I hear he likes to ask questions, that he listens a lot, that he has refused to make fast presidential decisions. Lisa had a habit of titling the subject line of an email thread as a kind of “hook” or half-sentence that she’d finish only when her reader opened the message: “Just a quick email to say that…” or “Can’t believe that I forgot to mention…” She was counting on you to show up, to be an audience, and always in the reflexive spirit she embodied. She once advised me on one of my own personal heartaches: “[T]ime will tell, and quite possibly in surprising or complicated or difficult ways. Something may happen that causes you to reconsider your current decision…but it also may not” (correspondence, 5/1/19). Lisa would not tell me what to do or how to know, however much I might have welcomed such a directive in my darkest moments, because I had to be the one to lug my own sets of experiences, needs, histories to the doorway of any (even temporary) position. Who will toast this antidote to the doldrums with me?  

Again, I keep the faith: such work is happening in our field right now, work that opens doors we might each differently walk through. Aja Martinez frames her recent “On Cucuys in Bird’s Feathers: A Counterstory as a Parable,” as such: “[T]his counterstory reviews the central topics of this story-as-parable while maintaining pressure on the audience to (based on their own lived actions and experiences) read/see themselves in the fictional characters within” (44). We can be generous in noticing when others are walking towards us; we can respond to Martinez’s invitation to “read/see” ourselves; we can acknowledge the mileage traveled and yet still to go; we can refuse the “drive toward closure,” shaped as it has always been by forces of domination. With such an array of potentialities we might just move together, wind in our collective sails not suddenly but after some time, the way real relationships happen and as Lisa would do it: “[M]y inclination, my desire, with any important scholarly project is always to write slowly, stopping often to monitor and reassess what I have written” (“Collaboration and Compromise: The Fine Art of Writing with a Friend” 36). We need not be stuck anywhere forever, fated to self-destruction, if we resist fundamentally going it alone, forcing a unidirectional argument, and failing to think against our own grains. And so, with that I’ll end with an image of Lisa and me on that night when she was wrong, back in 2015, knowing she would toast to the idea of reassessing herself and in hopes she might—slowly, cautiously—acknowledge her deep and necessary place in our field’s ever-evolving relationship with words.

Figure 1: Lisa Ede and Jessica Restaino. Image description: Two women, Lisa Ede (left) and Jessica Restaino (right) are sitting together on a bed. On the bed is a colorful throw pillow and an American flag blanket. The women are smiling and holding in between them a bottle of gin.

Works Cited

Ede, Lisa. Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location. Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.

Ede. Lisa and Andrea Lunsford. “Dear Lisa/Dear Andrea: On Friendship and Collaboration.” Writing Together: Collaboration in Theory and Practice, A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012,  pp. 51-66.

Ede, Lisa and Andrea Lunsford. “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 35, no. 2, 1984, pp. 155-71.

Ede, Lisa and Andrea Lunsford. “Collaboration and Compromise: The Fine Art of Writing with a Friend.” Writers on Writing, vol. 2, edited by Tom Waldrep, Random House, 1988, pp. 121-27.

Ede, Lisa, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford. “Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism.” Rhetorica, vol. 8, no. 4, 1995, pp. 401-41.

Ede, Lisa. “Re: I’m sorry I have been out of touch.” Received by Jessica Restaino, 19 Dec. 2021.

—. “Re: 4/29 was the deadline for the Provost’s promotion decision…” Received by  Jessica Restaino, 5 May 2021.

Martinez, Aja Y. “On Cucuys in Bird’s Feathers: A Counterstory as Parable.” Writers: Craft and Context, vol. 1, 2020, pp. 44-46.

NOAA’S National Ocean Service. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, 2021, https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/. Accessed 24 October, 2021.

For Lisa: A Patchwork Quilt

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I was only ten years old when Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford published Singular Texts/Plural Authors. I am embarrassed to say, I didn’t read this book until after Lisa’s death. Less than a week after Lisa’s passing, I sat in my colleague Becky Rickly’s office as she pointed at her bookshelf and talked about how she’d have to give away all these books when she retires. I noticed Lisa and Andrea’s book on her shelf and grabbed it, selfishly. Longingly. Becky explained how she borrowed the book from Mick Doherty and wasn’t able to return it before he passed away in 2013. So there it sat. I asked if I could have it, and Becky said yes. How much of our reading and writing is haunted by death and the loss of loved ones? How much of our scholarly work is a collaboration over time, with the voices of our mentors shaping us, and the texts and memories they have given us carried with us? 

* * * 

I first met Lisa in September 2005 when I started my master’s degree at Oregon State and took her class on language, technology, and culture. I had no idea Lisa was such a big deal when I applied to OSU, nor really when I met her. If you met Lisa, you would have no idea she was a big deal. She was so humble, so unassuming. 

Lisa’s class, along with teaching first-year writing at OSU and taking Vicki Tolar Burton’s class on teaching writing, convinced me to switch my MA emphasis from literature to rhetoric and writing. Like Lisa, I had wanted to be a teacher for a long time. And, like Lisa, academia had drawn me momentarily away from teaching towards wanting to study literature, but teaching drew me back to pedagogical commitments. As Lisa writes, “my teaching drew me back to my aspirations as a teacher. With my ‘conversion’ to rhet/comp, I felt a renewed sense of pedagogical commitment and purpose” (“How to Get” 21-22). 

* * * 

One of my favorite stories Lisa would tell (and re-tell) was of her time at Wisconsin–Madison during the Vietnam War. I don’t remember all the specifics, but she explained that after a protest was broken up, she hid from the police on some family’s porch or behind their bushes. When the family saw her, she was certain she’d be kicked off the property and arrested or assaulted by the police, but instead, the family allowed her to stay. I know this was the 1970s, and Lisa was young. But when she told this story, I didn’t imagine a young woman. I imagined Lisa from the late 2000s hiding on this porch behind bushes, a 60-year-old woman with gray hair, immensely curious, kind, and stubborn all at once. 

* * * 

One of the most rewarding activities we did in Lisa’s graduate courses was to read each other’s I-Search Essays (a brief essay exploring our personal investments in a research project) and then to write short 3-5-sentence “Valentines” to each other about what we enjoyed about the essays (criticism was forbidden). We’d spend part of a class period handing out our Valentines, then reading them privately, and then talking about the experience of reading each other’s projects, writing the Valentines, and receiving and reading our Valentines. This was such a wonderful community-building activity—and an affirmation of each of us as individual writers—that I’ve used it in my first-year writing classes multiple times. Lisa helped me to not only see the value of community-building in my teaching but also how to be intentional in building communities of writers in my classes. (See Lisa’s Situating Composition 209-215 for a discussion of the I-Search Essay, this activity, and how she approached teaching graduate-level composition courses.) 

* * * 

Lisa was immensely curious and promoted that curiosity in her students. I wrote a final project for her composition theory class that was hypertextual with multiple nodes and links. It was hard to read and navigate, with very little coherence as a seminar project. I no longer have Lisa’s comments on the project (it was a WordPress install on my OSU page that has since been lost), but I do remember her commenting that she felt like she didn’t know how to read it. I think Lisa wasn’t sure how to read many of my projects in that class. But she also encouraged me to continue the lines of inquiry around composition, composure, and new media theory. 

My I-Search Essay for Lisa’s composition theory class was inspired by Geoffrey Sirc’s “Never Mind the Tagmemics,” a queer and anti-racist desire for social justice and change, and punk aesthetics and music. Rather than a traditional essay, I created a collage, cut-and-pasted together with scissors and tape like a zine. I included quotations from Sirc and punk lyrics, and I photocopied and taped on handwritten comments from my classmate Marieke, who had provided me feedback on a previous draft. 

I had no idea at the time that Lisa had already written these words: “Experiment with ways of expanding scholarly genres and of resisting the conventional ways that knowledge circulates in composition—but recognize the potential difficulty and complexity of such efforts” (Situating 200). 

* * * 

Figure 1. The frontside of my 2006 I-Search Essay for Lisa’s class. Image description: a page of typed words, formatted creatively: some lines are upside down, some are in the margin, some are centered, and some are left-aligned. The words mix memoir and analysis, and some of the writing is in the form of test questions, parodizing testing. On the page are Lisa Ede’s short handwritten comments.

Figure 2. The backside of my 2006 I-Search Essay for Lisa’s class. Image description: another page in the same assignment, with quotations from Geoffrey Sirc and short responses. Like the previous page, blocks of text are formatted freely, with some text centered and some running vertically up the right side of the page. Lisa’s short comments are encouraging Michael to use the margin space, literally and figuratively.

* * * 

Lisa encouraged me and provided space for me to see the connections between my developing queer and antiracist politics, new media, and rhetoric and composition. Late in life, Lisa wrote about how she didn’t at first see connections between her scholarly work and her personal feminist commitments (“How to Get” 25). She clearly learned from that experience and encouraged that connection-making in her students, particularly how intertwined the personal and the academic are. Now, 15 years later, as a teacher and an administrator, I see how Lisa’s stress on the intertwinement of the personal and scholarly has shaped my commitments and practices. Before I ask why others should care about a project, I ask why my students care. What are our “passionate attachments” (Situating 195, quoting Jacqueline Jones Royster) to this project? What drives you in this project? 

* * * 

 This memorial is a collage—a “patch-work quilt,” to quote Carl Leggo’s “Ninety-five Questions” (405), one of the first essays Lisa encouraged me to read—because I don’t have faith in linearity. Lisa didn’t know how to read my intertext hypermedia project in her composition theory class. I don’t know how to read my grief. 

* * * 

When I teach TTU’s graduate course on Histories and Theories of Composition, I assign the opening pages of Lisa’s Situating Composition. “What are we talking about when we talk about composition?” Lisa asks (3). The opening questions of Situating Composition (3-4) are the opening questions of our field. I don’t know if there are two pages in the field that so succinctly state (or, more accurately, ask) what is at stake in what we do and study. 

 Lisa gave me a copy of Situating Composition when I defended my MA thesis. As I write this, I return to Situating Composition, especially the strategies Lisa provides “to encourage readers to consider the advantages and disadvantage of particular practices for their own scholarly inquiry” (192). As I reread, I am astonished again by the integrity and ethics informing these practices, asking scholars to theorize practices but also to see theory as a situated set of practices that requires reflexivity, historicity, and generosity, as well as critique, experimentation, and situating of both oneself and of one’s practices. 

* * * 

Figure 3. Lisa’s 2007 inscription in my copy of Situating Composition. I share this because I find Lisa’s handwriting so beautiful. In 1990, my third-grade teacher told my class that someone in the Talented and Gifted program had such messy handwriting that they didn’t belong in the program. I don’t know for sure, but I think she was talking about me. When I look at Lisa’s handwriting, I’m reminded of Lisa’s immense love but also how her scholarship and teaching challenged the norms of literacy, like the one my third-grade teacher reinforced. Lisa’s handwriting is difficult for me to decipher but also incredibly beautiful. I feel all sorts of pleasure in how my third-grade teacher would read Lisa’s writing as “messy.” Image description: the title page of Situating Composition with Lisa’s note: “Dear Michael, I find myself strangely without words, so I’ll just say that it’s been an honor and a privilege to learn with & from you. You have so much to give our field & the world. I look forward to seeing (& valuing) your many contributions. All best, Lisa.”

* * * 

Lisa wrote to me that it was “an honor and privilege to learn with and from you.” I think I learned from Lisa that teaching is a matter of learning with and from our students. Lisa taught me that while we do have a lot to offer our students, they have more to offer us as we learn together.  

* * * 

My first conference presentation was a collaboration with Lisa for The New Research Summit at the University of Oregon in 2006, where Lisa discussed Amazon citizen reviews and I discussed student blogging. Most of my publications since have been collaborative—with my mentors at Penn State or with colleagues or graduate students at Texas Tech. Lisa explained to me personally—and to all of us in writing (“How to Get” 23-24)—that collaboration was met with resistance or suspicion from tenure and promotion committees. I believe it was because of Lisa’s (and so many others’) precedents in the field that led to little resistance to the frequent collaboration in my dossier for my tenure case. Lisa changed our field, not simply in ideas in print, but in practices and in values. 

* * * 

Lisa helped me attend to the situations of composing. I write in coffee shops and bars, with a body—elated, frustrated, crying. I pay attention to the materiality of my writing because of Lisa. I write this at my favorite bar, with Lisa and Andrea’s book near me, a whiskey and coke, a pack of cigarettes, my eyes flooded with tears. 

Figure 4. Workspace at the bar: Reading Lisa and Andrea’s book and writing this essay with a whiskey and coke. Image description: a close-up of the spine of the book Singular Texts/Plural Authors, its solid blue cover without a dust jacket. The book is placed on a polished wood bar. Just behind the book, out of focus, is a black ashtray and two drinks: one whiskey and coke and the other empty, finished, except ice.

* * * 

I worry my words in this memorial aren’t right. They aren’t enough. When Clancy Ratliff emailed me about contributing to this memorial, she wrote, “whatever you give us will be the right thing.” I don’t know if this is the right thing. 

In her essay republished in this issue, Lisa asks, “how do I avoid the potential narcissism inherent in a focus on my research, my career? What do I have to say, I found myself asking over and over as I sat fretting at my computer, that might be of some use to those who are earlier in their scholarly and professional paths?” (“How to Get” 27-28). I ask myself similar questions as I fret at my computer. How do I avoid the potential narcissism inherent in a focus on my relationship with Lisa? What do I have to say that can matter to others? One of my many takeaways from my relationship with Lisa and her scholarship (including her essay reprinted in this issue) is that relationships (mentoring, friendships, etc.) are part of what we learn to do when we learn to be part of a discipline or profession. They need to be intentionally fostered and cultivated with care and curiosity. Lisa epitomized that intentional care and curiosity, and she taught so many of us how to practice our commitments to our students and to each other. 

Works Cited 

Ede, Lisa. “How to Get a Nonacademic Position.” Women’s Professional Lives in Rhetoric and Composition: Choice, Chance, and Serendipity, edited by Elizabeth A. Flynn and Tiffany Bourelle, The Ohio State UP, 2018, pp. 18-29. 

—. Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location. Southern Illinois UP, 2004. 

Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Southern Illinois UP, 1990. 

Leggo, Carl. “Ninety-five Questions for Generating Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of the Pedagogical Practices of Writing Teachers.” Language Arts, vol. 67, no. 4, 1999, pp. 399-405. 

Sirc, Geoffrey. “Never Mind the Tagmemics, Where’s the Sex Pistols?” College Composition and Communication, vol. 48, no. 1, 1997, pp. 9-29. 

Review of Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy

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Baker-Bell, April. Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. Routledge, 2020.

Introduction

In Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, Assistant Professor of Language, Literacy, and English Education at Michigan State University, April Baker-Bell shows readers she ain’t new to the Black Language (BL hereafter) conversation, but that she true to it. Conversations throughout the field of composition and literacy studies bout the literacy development of Black people within the American Education System been a hot topic and continues today. It ain’t no secret that Black people in America have been the topic of discussion in various conversations. Most of these conversations evolve round Black people…dare I say it…bein Black, literally. For example, the world has witnessed Black Americans of various ages be attacked and murdered by racist white people for doin seemingly normal activities like walkin, runnin, playin music, sleepin, singin outside, and complying with police demands to name a few. Moreover, Baker-Bell’s research on BL and pedagogical suggestions for how literacy educators, researchers, and students can benefit from first examining and then incorporating BL into the writing classroom, makes Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity and Pedagogy required reading for those who want to know about the conversations regarding the validity of BL and its use by Black and non-Black people alike.

What’s the 411?: Overview of Linguistic Justice

Wit more than 20 years’ experience teaching English at the high school and collegiate level, Baker-Bell blesses readers with six chapters in Linguistic Justice. In chapter one she identifies the purpose of Linguistic Justice in chapter one arguing:

people’s language experiences are not separate from their racial experiences. Indeed, the way a Black child’s language is devalued in school reflects how Black lives are devalued in the world. Similarly, the way a white child’s language is privileged and deemed the norm in schools is directly connected to the invisible ways that white culture is deemed normal, neutral, and superior in the world. (2)

Through this argument, Baker-Bell confronts the catalyst behind the continued conversation of BL and literacy education of Black students who speak and write using BL as it is an integral part of their identity: white supremacy. White supremacist ideologies within the American education system where Black students were and continue to be demeaned and labeled deficient because they don’t use “White Mainstream English” (WME hereafter) is because the idea of WME as the only acceptable form of English has been ingrained into the psyche of educators, parents, and students (3). Therefore, any language spoken or written that don’t mirror WME was/is deemed wrong, inadequate, deficit and the list goes on. As a teacher-scholar-activist, Baker-Bell challenges educators, scholars, and graduate students in various fields dedicated to language and literacy, to fight back against white supremacist ideologies which promote Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and subsequently Anti-Blackness, to Black students across the United States and the world. In addition to this argument, Baker-Bell presents “Linguistic Justice as a Black Language Theoreticum, a theory meets practicum” (8), for its contents expand seemingly traditional models of teaching. In chapter 2, Baker-Bell introduces readers to the theory of Anti-Black Linguistic Racism to show how prejudice against Black language is synonymous with racism against Black people and culture. Moreover, she offers Black Language Pedagogy as a method for students and Antiracist educators to resist and dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism within the classroom, ultimately the world. Chapter 3 highlights the voices of several BL speaking high-school students who Baker-Bell worked with regarding their lived experiences with Black Linguistic Racism in and outside of school. This chapter is unique in that Baker-Bell centers these student voices to show how Anti-Black Linguistic Racism negatively impacts Black students’ identity and agency in and outside of the classroom. Chapter 4 showcases Baker-Bell’s Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy in action. Here, she details examples of lessons and activities she used to teach the high school students at Leadership Academy how to “challenge, interrogate, unlearn, and work toward dismantling Anti-Black Linguistic Racism” (64). In Chapter 5, Baker-Bell shares responses of the students she worked with previously (in chapter 3) on what they learned about Black Language and Anti-Black Linguistic Racism via the activities and lessons she taught using Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy.  Finally, Chapter 6 considered a Bonus chapter by Baker-Bell, provides readers with an update on her research with the students from Leadership Academy in addition to activities for English teachers to incorporate Linguistic Justice as a framework within they classes. Specifically, these activities and lessons curated within chapter were developed from award winning Young Adult fiction author, Angie Thomas’ bestseller, T.H.U.G.: The Hate U Give. Through the various chapters, Baker-Bell takes readers on a journey that ain’t for the faint of heart, especially if they goal is to actively practice Anti-Racist Pedagogy and Anti-Racist Black Linguistic Racism.

Words from the Black Language G.O.A.T.

 In Linguistic Justice, readers learn of Baker-Bell’s contribution to the ongoing BL conversation through the foreword that precedes its initial chapters. Michigan State University Professor of English, Emerita, the livin legend herself, Dr. Geneva Smitherman highlighted Baker-Bell’s contribution to the BL and literacy education conversation by continuing da work of those scholars who came before her in the foreword. Smitherman praises Baker-Bell sayin:

At long last, this is the book we have all been waiting for. A book designed to develop our students’ critical understanding of and historical consciousness about Black Language. A book that builds on that critical inquiry to motivate students to formulate ways of impacting and changing the linguistic status quo. As a leading member of a new generation of language and literature scholar-teacher-activists, Dr. April Baker-Bell represents for Black Language and it’s speakers because she gets it. (xii)

Dr. Smitherman’s declaration that Baker-Bell “gets it” is a statement that rings true and is shown throughout Linguistic Justice. As an early-career scholar in composition and applied linguistics whose research centers how Black Women English Teachers-Scholars (BWETS hereafter) navigate the field as BL speakers and writers, Linguistic Justice snatched the teeny tiny bit of edges I had left (my doctoral journey took the majority of them; but that’s a story for another publication).

Engaging with Linguistic Justice: How specific Chapters influenced my Pedagogy

As mentioned previously, Linguistic Justice challenges not only educators, but ANYONE in the field of English and literacy studies to critically examine they own beliefs regarding BL as well as the ways they intentionally or unintentionally perpetuate Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and Anti-Blackness in they teaching. For example, in chapter 3 “Killing Them Softly” I was forced to revisit my own experiences with Anti-Black Linguistic Racism as a young jawn, when Baker-Bell introduced the counterstories, a womanist practice,  of Black students she worked with at Leadership Academy Charter School in Detroit. Specifically, I resonated with the experience of “Janel” who had spent the majority of her life navigating Anti-Black Linguistic Racism from teachers, administrators, Black elders and her own BL speaking family members.  Resonating with Janel’s experience reinforced my commitment to actively dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic and Anti-Blackness within myself (ex. checkin myself when I start tryna judge someone’s level of customer service simply because they use BL to communicate). In my teaching, I encourage my students to bring their full selves not only to my course but to the assignments too. I encourage them to write in they home languages in an effort to recognize and honor the validity of languages outside of WME. I model this by usin BL in my syllabus and in the written feedback I provide on papers. I look forward to incorporating Linguistic Justice and Baker-Bell’s use of composite character counter storytelling methodology into my own research on BL speaking and writing BWETS.  In chapter 5 “Black Linguistic Consciousness” Baker-Bell calls out language and literacy educators when she says

You can’t be out here saying that you believe in linguistic diversity at the same time of shutting students down as soon as they open their mouths. You have to be about this life for real for real! You have to be ready and willing to challenge everything you once understood about language and what students need in language education. You have to be ready for the messiness that comes with the process. (100)

Baker-Bell urges educators to move beyond talk about bein or becoming Anti-Racist Educators by challenging themselves and their colleagues to actively engage in dismantling Anti-Black Linguistic Racism. For students, Baker-Bell provides them with the academic receipts to protect themselves from and ultimately challenge Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and internalized Anti-Black Linguistic Racism from teachers, administrators, elders, and family members who still privilege WME as the gold standard. While Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice calls out educators, researchers, graduate students to focus on undoing Anti-Black Linguistic Racism, in true Black woman fashion, Baker-Bell shows that while she is calling these people out, that she ain’t gon leave em hangin’ to try to carry out this call on they own. Thus, she provided the previously mentioned bonus chapter (see “THUG LIFE”) with sample activities for how language and literacy educators can integrate Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy into they own teaching. Baker-Bell was gracious enough to share seven “Black Language Artifacts” “that can be implemented, altered, or used for inspiration to help teachers think through how to use literature in pursuit of linguistic and racial justice” (104).

Why You NEED Linguistic Justice…Periodt!

Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy ain’t no ordinary theory/research text, it is a movement. Linguistic Justice is a movement in that its content propels language and literacy educators and students to become movers and shakers within the continued fight against Anti-Black Linguistic Racism, Antiracist pedagogy, and Anti-Blackness as a whole—a critical component of womanist practices. Specifically, for the field of composition, Linguistic Justice directly addresses the common question of how to teach about BL as a vital part of literacy education for not just Black students, but non-Black students also. For teachers and scholars of composition, Linguistic Justice serves as a bold reminder of how many were taught to privilege WME as the correct way of writing and speaking within the writing classroom. Therefore, Linguistic Justice should be considered required reading in teacher education programs, as well as professional development for current teachers across the K-16 levels. What’s more, is Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice Framework could benefit not just composition but can be included in trainings and curriculums for non-humanities/social science fields. As Smitherman complimented sayin she “gets it”, I truly believe Linguistic Justice was Baker-Bell’s collective homage to the brilliance and beauty of Black Language, Black identity, Black education, Black people, and most of all Black freedom, and she desires for everybody and they mama to “get it” and get it (meaning purchase the book) you should, dear reader.

Review of Asian American Feminisms & Women of Color Politics, edited by Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan

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Fujiwara, Lynn, and Shireen Roshanravan (Eds). Asian American Feminisms & Women of Color Politics, University of Washington Press, 2018.

Asian American Feminisms & Women of Color Politics is a collection edited by Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan. I first read the book in the summer of 2020 in the midst of another wave of Black Lives Matter movement calling for justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other Black people murdered by the police. This was not only another moment of awakening for me to the racial injustice in this country, particularly against Black people, but also to reflect on my own racialized positionality. Now, I’m reading this collection for a second time, barely a year later, at yet another kairotic moment when six Asian women’s lives were taken by a white terrorist in a racially and sexually motivated crime in Atlanta and the nation is perhaps finally recognizing the racial violence against Asian peoples that has long existed yet particularly heightened due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Drawing from multiple disciplinary perspectives, this collection moves toward theorizing an Asian American feminist praxis, contextualized in transnational and transcultural politics and grounded in intersectional and decolonial approaches. It starts by tracing the history of Asian American feminist genealogies in a global context from the work of third world feminist and Asian decolonization in Grace Kyungwon Hong’s chapter to Judy Tzu-Chun Wu’s efforts in making visible the differences and tensions between radical and liberal strands of Asian American feminisms developed in the 20th century. This history offers a good foundation for readers to engage with the rest of the chapters approaching Asian American feminisms and politics from a multitude of perspectives.

In this review, I highlight important takeaways from each section, without necessarily going through each chapter linearly but thematically, because this journey of learning and growth for me is iterative and recursive, embedded in my own experiences and positionalities as a Chinese permanent resident living in the U.S., a scholar and student of feminist rhetorics.

Challenging the Dominant Asian American Narratives

Several chapters challenge readers to reflect on the labels we use for Asian Diaspora, such as “Asian American” (107) or “Asian Canadian” women (156): how can we perceive this complex identity in all its multifacetedness? Who may be included or excluded by these labels? What gets erased or neglected? Stephanie Nohelani Teves and Maile Arvin critique the use of the term “Asian Pacific Islanders.” They remind us of the colonial history of Pacific Islanders, and argue that Asian Americans need to recognize their own complicity in marginalizing Pacific Islanders and erasing their histories while offer recommendations for teaching and research in Asian American studies.

In discussing the “South Asian Canadian women” cultural position, Sunera Thobani warns us of “colonial ideologies of passive victimhood and patriarchal cultures characterized by misogynist violence” which neglect the struggles South Asian Canadian women experience against social, economic, and political forces (157). Similarly, Thomas Xavier Sarmiento highlights the importance of a descriptive approach to the complex and multiple identities one might embody. Sarmiento looks to diasporic Filipinx literature for a Filipinx American feminist and queer political orientation to challenge colonial oppression and white supremacy, arguing that “gender liberation must be fundamentally queer” (100).

Erin Khuê Ninh’s chapter on sexual violence in the everyday lives of Asian American women is particularly poignant to read in light of what happened in Atlanta. Ninh calls us to attune to the “gender socialization” that Asian American women may experience, arguing that “Asian American women’s experiences of sexual coercion are ‘culturally’ inflected: sabotaged by the model minority paradigm not as stereotype but as subject formation” (76). She argues to “make coercion structural, not inflictive” and emphasizes that the question of consent should not be that of a “yes/no delineation” but instead “How do you feel?” (77).

I especially appreciate the detailed research accounts by authors who lay bare their own vulnerability, self-reflection, and positionality as they approach their research and activist work (Sarmiento; Ninh; Fujiwara; Kimoto). I resonate with the emphasis on how our positionality in any situation may allow us to “approach resistance movements from varying points of entry and belonging” (Fujiwara 247). There isn’t one Asian American subject, as there isn’t one Asian American feminist subject. We are always already embedded in a contextualized network based on interconnected identity markers and values.

Asian American Intersectional Feminist Organizing

Part four of the book presents inspirational activist work and Asian American feminist organizing, demonstrating how this contextualized examination and reflection of positionality is crucial to advancing feminist causes. Ma Vang’s analysis of a refugee community health organization in the U.S. and theorizing of a Hmong feminist praxis of care pushes the limits of feminist epistemology and centers refugees not as passive victims needing help but active agents of change in their own communities who in turn also shape institutional practices and bridge different feminist formations (185). From a transnational perspective, Gina Velasco rejects the moralistic framework often adopted by international organizations and policies that further exploits gendered Philippine migrant workers by focusing almost exclusively on sexual labor as sex trafficking (202).

Similarly, Priya Kandaswamy calls for an intersectional approach to reproductive justice through the analysis of the criminalization of Purvi Patel in the U.S., highlighting the interlocking factors that shape the regulation of reproductive rights as much as gender: race, class, immigration status, and ability. Kandaswamy critiques the portrayals of Patel, by those who supported her, who prosecuted her, and by media in general that fall into stereotyping Asian women as deceptive, manipulative, and lack of agency, victims of their own patriarchal cultures rather than individuals who can make their own choices (223). Across the three chapters in Part four, we can see authors centering the agency of marginalized Asian American women and their own practices of empowerment while revealing the structural and systemic forces that aim to reduce the complex identities of different Asian American women.

Toward a Coalitional and Multiple Asian American Feminist Praxis

A central theme throughout the book is an emphasis on coalitional politics built across the differences of groups of people who identify as Asian diaspora, rather than essentializing any specific group as representing Asian or Asian American community. Many chapters (e.g., Velasco, Thobani, Kimoto, Sarmiento) challenge simplistic politics of representation and call for intersectional attunement not only along gender and racial lines, but also to historical, economic, social, and political contexts. And authors in this collection have demonstrated how this work can be done with care.

Tamsin Kimoto’s chapter brings forth the historical work underpinning the systemic racializing work in the U.S. that pitted Asian Americans against Black Americans. Referencing Sara Ahmed, Kimoto lays out how whiteness is a standard in reference to which the world is conceived, both as “an implicit and coercive goal” that non-white racialized others are oriented toward and “the barometer by which we [racialized others] measure our own successes” (143). This is why a feminist praxis valuing multiplicity is important. Fujiwara writes:

“a coalitional praxis that presumes the multiple interdependent heterogeneous subjectivities of Asian Americans requires us to utilize the lens of multiplicity, a lens that foregrounds racialized neocolonial systems of neoliberalism and globalization to illuminate incommensurabilities within and across Asian America as sites of coalitional consciousness-raising” (245).

Such lens of multiplicity is particularly important as we see Asian American feminisms and politics embedded in and connected with women of color feminisms more broadly. For example, Kandaswamy’s chapter connects the criminalization of Purvi Patel using feticide legislation to the broader prison industrial complex that disproportionate criminalizes people of color by drawing parallel between Patel’s portrayal as a sympathetic victim with the criminalization of Black women as “crack mothers.” This is not to reduce either group’s suffering, but to actually help us see the “common differences” in how the state seeks to control the reproductive rights of women of color (Mohanty, cited in 221).

Using the case of NYPD officer Peter Liang’s murder of Black man Akai Gurley, Roshanravan warns us the “model-minority racial project” (270). As Asian/Asian Americans, we should be reflexive of our own positionality and must not be disillusioned by the allure of model minority or be blind to the relative privilege that perception might afford us. An Asian American visibility must be achieved horizontally across racial interconnectedness in the “racial third space” with other communities of color without mimicking or co-opting other identification of its own cultural specificity (Roshanravan 268).

In our current context, the fight for justice for the murders of Asian American women cannot lead to calls for more police because we must recognize how police brutality has always been a danger to immigrant communities, Asian American communities and Black communities alike. As immigrants, we must resist the simplistic binary of inclusion/exclusion into a national identity of being American, but to actually challenge and transform that nationalistic construct to one that’s based on care for and celebration of differences.

“Stay in Place and Stay on the Move”

To challenge the ways that Asian Americans have been racialized in proximity to whiteness, I go back to Tamsin Kimoto’s use of “restiveness” in our orientation, which embodies both a meaning to stay in place and to stay on the move.

Restiveness as staying in place may mean staying with the “silence” that’s been associated so much with Asian communities in recognizing both how Asian Americans have been pushed to stay silent throughout history and how that silence has ill served the histories of Asian Americans and other people of color and Indigenous peoples (146). Staying in place in this way means to critically reflect on what has been left unsaid but also what’s been said and amplified. Similar to Kimoto’s example of the “Resistance Auntie” meme of an Asian Trump supporter (147), one might think of the more recent incident where a Texas GOP congressional candidate Sery Kim, a Korean American, made racist comments toward Chinese immigrants (Cole). A “staying-in-place” restive orientation in this case means rejecting both the racist nature of Kim’s comments and recognizing how her positionality is the result of historical and ongoing orientation toward whiteness in this country that has often aimed to pit different people of color communities against each other.

Upon this reflection, Asian Americans can be restive as staying on the move working against the violence toward Indigenous lands and communities in the context of Hawaii (Kimoto 148-149). Similarly, it also behooves Asian American communities to orient toward the struggles of Black communities, such as in the case of Asians4BlackLives campaign (Roshanravan 274). In both situations, we must stay on the move, shifting our investment away from the white heteropatriarchy toward the collective intersectional coalition building across minoritized communities.

I end my review here as I find this dual understanding of “restiveness” a good point of departure for me from this book back to my daily life as a scholar and teacher of rhetoric and composition and technical communication; my positionality as a Chinese woman living in the U.S., researching Chinese feminist rhetorics both in China and globally. As BIPOC researchers and teachers, our positionality in the academy is often already precarious. But our students rely on us, requiring that we be restive, modeling for them a critical understanding and reflection of personal identities contextualized historically, economically, culturally, and politically. For feminist scholars more broadly, this book offers another opportunity to learn about Asian American feminisms and women of color politics, drawing attention to sites where more rhetorical research may be needed.

Works Cited

  • Cole, Devan. “Republican Congresswomen Call Out ‘Hurtful’ Comments made about Chinese Immigrants by Texas GOP Candidate They Endorsed.” CNN, 1 Apr. 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/01/politics/sery-kim-texas-candidate-chinese-immigrants/index.html. Accessed 16 Apr. 2021. -return to text
  • Fujiwara, Lynn, and Shireen Roshanravan (Eds). Asian American Feminisms & Women of Color Politics, University of Washington Press, 2018.

 

On Race, Feminism, and Rhetoric: An Introductory/Manifesto Flow…

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The fact of the matter is, we wouldn’t have any feminism worth thinking about or writing about without the work of feminists of color. They have pushed feminism to be better and do better since the beginning. However, these feminists often are not afforded the credit they deserve for creating feminist spaces or demanding change within feminist spaces. During the Suffrage Movement it was Sojourner Truth’s speech at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, that demanded we recognize the voices and perspectives of all women. The work that Black women, lesbians and working class women did to push the mainstream white middle class feminism of the 1970s to speak across race, class, and sexuality made feminism stronger. Feminists of color in the 1970s writing in anthologies like This Bridge Called My Back, Home Girls, and But Some of Us Are Brave started building a third wave of feminism before the 1990s gave us yet another wave. It was a young Black and Jewish woman named Rebecca Walker who strongly proclaimed “we are the third wave” and sparked a new generation of feminists. And we won’t even get into the fact that many of the third wave white feminists of the 1990s who rejected their white mothers’ second wave feminism did so using the intellectual and activist work of second wave feminists of color…

It has always been the voices of feminists of color, most specifically, the voices of Black feminists, and even more specifically, the voices of Black lesbian feminists, that pushed feminist movements to realize the radical notion that all womxn are people. When we put out the call for this special issue “On Race, Feminism and Rhetoric,” we were looking for scholarly complications to the discourse around white feminism that critically engaged the idea: Feminism has never really been white. We maintain that people say feminism is white because it is easier than calling out white supremacy. Like Iyanla Vanzant, we and the contributors in this special issue demand that everyone call a thing a thing, beloveds. Like good rhetoricians, we know that words actually mean things. So you are not really doing feminism if your feminism is only concerned with white women. You are practicing white supremacy. PeriodT. If you are a person of color and you want to call out limited agendas masquerading as “feminist” that seem to only take white women’s issues into consideration, don’t call that “white feminism.” Call it racism, because that is not how feminism works.

We hope this special issue pushes the field to recognize that we need more nuanced approaches to dealing with the intersections of race and rhetoric. We need to be able to point out inequities in communities of color and make sure our responses to those inequities do not further marginalize other communities. We need to champion causes that support anti-racist initiatives, but we can not perpetuate discourse around those initiatives that weaponizes dehumanizing rhetoric and action against people of color. We need to hold space for tension and nuance in our discussions of race, feminism and rhetoric. For example, if we take into consideration the most recent incarnation of anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States, we can illustrate the multiple needs for more nuanced conversations. We need rhetorical approaches that are coalitional and anti-racist. We need rhetorical approaches that can help us deal with the role that the white/racist/capitalist/patriarchal nation state played in stirring up anti-Asian hate in its citizens, because that same hate was coming from the mouth and Tweets of the President of the United States. We need rhetorical approaches that help us grapple with the fact that the same white/racist/capitalist/patriarchal nation state will use those hate crimes against Asian communities, that the discordant nation state provoked, in order to police Black and Brown bodies. Our rhetoric needs to recognize and call a thing a thing. All hate crimes are hate crimes. And we can no longer excuse, substantiate, or gloss over the cishet white males citizens who commit hate crimes. Because if it is a Black or Brown teenager assaulting an Asian elder in the street we will rightfully call it a hate crime. But when it is a cishet white guy on a killing spree who walks into massage parlors with his recently and easily purchased guns and murders the Asian women working to support themselves and their families during a global pandemic, then our political rhetoric makes room for excuses like adolescence, white fragility, or he was just “having a really bad day.” We can’t make this shit up, but we can demand that the double standards get called what they are and cultivate rhetorical approaches that help us to call it what it is. We need rhetorical approaches and rhetorical analysis that can hold in tension how quickly the Anti Asian Hate Crime Bill passed and was signed by the President of the United States when we still can’t get any version of an Anti-Lynching Bill passed in this country since the 1900s. We need rhetoric that is not afraid to complicate things and push past niceties and civilities to ask hard questions.

We need to start asking hard questions instead of being scared of answers. The work Ibram X. Kendi is doing around anti-racist education tells us the word “racist” is not a personal characteristic, like having blue or brown eyes, but a word that defines ideas that weaponize marginalization, inequity, and other systems of oppression onto people of color. In February 1837, John C. Calhoun stood on the United States Senate floor and argued that slavery in this country was a “positive good” not because it literally was, but because racism has to be intellectualized. Racism, your racism, is a habit of mind and you can not break those habits by being too scared to face the history they represent. Rhetoricians can not be so afraid of being called a racist that they aren’t recognizing that the linguistic construction of the word doesn’t support their fears–it outlines historic power imbalances that they have the responsibility to change. You want to know how to call a thing a thing? Start by asking better questions. Instead of: who, me? ask what just happened here? Because you will not find the traces of your racism in your fear or in your feelings, you will only find them in your history.

This contemporary moment, perhaps more than any other, has shown us the relevance and importance of race, feminism and rhetoric. The current global pandemic has put a spotlight on institutionalized inequities around race, class and gender. The ongoing protests and unrest around police brutality and murders have forced us to come to terms with the meaning of solidarity and coalition in the struggle. Extreme nationalism has ripped children from the arms of their parents and placed them in cages, going against every fiber of the founding lies of the United States. The recent election and the fact that yet again over 50% of the white women who voted cast their vote for Donald Trump has made clear that assumed alliances around gender are not to be taken for granted when we add race to the mix. Now more than ever we need to be in nuanced and critical conversations on race, feminism, and rhetoric. This special issue of Peitho is an opening to some of the conversations we might have.

From Fair Fight Now to the Black Lives Matter Movement, Black women have been the driving force behind the change we need in America today. In the wake of the 2020 US elections, we need to have more conversations about how feminists of color combat the normalization of the refusal to transfer power, concede losses, and acknowledge the truth. Like we saw with the Women’s March controversy, we can not continue to tolerate feminists of color being pushed to the margins in the spaces we created. This bridge can no longer be our backs. As ‘The Squad’ on Capitol Hill grows to include even more womxn of color voices, we need to make space for complex conversations around what diversity and equality really means while continuing to hold our leadership accountable to the progress we have made. Now is not the time for half-measures, talking points for views, and conservative approaches. We need to center the voices of feminists of color who are doing the work to ensure our futures.

In their response to the January 6, 2021 violent attempted insurrection on the Nation’s Capital the Rhetoric Society of America Board of Directors wrote: “Rhetoric has long associated its birth as a discipline with the emergent political practice of democracy; however, the historic foundations of both have a disturbing affinity with racism. This embedded and systemic relation has allowed injustices to continue for centuries and cultivated power structures that normalize and justify violences, as grotesquely witnessed currently in the United States, where the mobbing thugs proudly displayed Nazi, anti-Semitic, and white power apparel, where citizens and political leaders led and endorsed a wide range of acts of voter suppression, but most recently in the Georgia elections in DeKalb and Fulton counties where insufficient polling places, proposed roll purges, and accusations of fraud threatened to limit the rights of Black voters.” (Rhetoric Society of America Board of Directors’ Statement Condemning Insurrectional Rhetoric and Resulting Violence 1/6/21) In other words, rhetoric is racist and has been used for ill and we need to own that and fix that. Stat. In order to answer the call that the future demands of us as rhetoricians, we have to take stock of what is really real. That “affinity with racism” that rhetoric has been entangled with since its inception cannot be ignored away. If rhetoric is going to ever be its best self then, just like feminists of color have been pushing feminism to do better since the Suffrage Movement, we need to use these conversations on race, feminism and rhetoric to push rhetoric to be all it needs to be in these times. We hope that the essays in this special issue will help shed light on all the important and nuanced ways that race, feminism and rhetoric intersect across time, in this moment, and around the world.

And because rhetoricians can’t seem to talk about race and rhetoric without an obligatory MLK quote, preferably from the historic “I Have a Dream” speech, we thought we would add one here. On that day in 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King said more than that he had a dream. He also said, “We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take in the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlight path of racial justice. Now is the time.” In the few months since we put out the call for this special issue, things have continued to happen that make the “fierce urgency of now” even more pronounced and pressing. Now more than ever we need to engage these conversations on race, feminism and rhetoric and enact a feminist of color discourse that is more than just lip service.

The senseless killing of Ma’Khia Bryant, the continued freedom and the lack of charges pressed against the cops that murdered Breonna Taylor, Naomi Osaka’s withdrawal from the French Open to protect her mental health, Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure at University of North Carolina, the ignorant and baseless attacks on Critical Race Theory, the failed attempts to censure Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the subjection and liberation of Meghan Markle, the troubling increase in anti-Semitism, the hate crimes against Asian American/Pacific Islanders, the ongoing uprising and displacement of the people of Palestine, and the countless unseen acts of violence against womxn around the globe, all drive home the point of the fierce urgency of this contemporary moment. Now, perhaps more than any other moment, has shown us not just the relevance and importance, but also the urgent need for scholarly complications to the discourse around race, feminism and rhetoric. We better learn to really talk about these issues in ways that move us toward action before it is indeed too late.

In the first season of the HBO comedy sketch show, A Black Lady Sketch Show, there is an ongoing sketch throughout all the episodes that takes place at the end of the world. The end of the world came and the only people left were four Black women because one of them built a fortified house and invited her girlfriends over for an end of the world party. Black women be knowing… In the second season of A Black Lady Sketch Show there is a very similar ongoing sketch with the now five Black women leads in a fortified warehouse at the end of the world. And again they are the only ones left. We find the idea that a group of Black women would be the only ones left at the end of the world compelling because as the world goes to shit all around us, it often feels like Black women are the only ones consistently trying to save us as we fight them every step of the way. We are reminded of Temptaous McKoy’s powerful Watson Conference keynote address: “‘…Had Y’all Simply Listened to Black Women’: A Call for Intentional Listening and Impactful Anti-Racist Action.” McKoy (like many Black women have been telling us in these internet streets #ListenToBlackWomen) made a powerful case for why we need to just listen to Black women before everything goes wrong. In the cover art image of this special issue,“Selfie at the End of the World,” Geneva Bowers brings the point home. The Black woman chucking the deuces and taking a selfie as the world is being destroyed behind her probably tried to tell everyone what was coming… But they didn’t listen. Shrug.

The articles in this special issue recognize the intersectional nature of feminist work around race, politics and rhetoric as a demand that feminist of color voices are the roots that sustain feminism. By sharing these scholars’ work we ensure our desires for change are heard in order to protect our collective futures. We were not surprised by the fact that the majority of our submissions to the special issue came from Black women across the Diaspora. As we have shown, Black women have always been important voices to these conversations and they will no doubt continue to be important voices. But those voices are not monolithic and the articles presented here highlight the variety in those voices and are joined by other feminists of color and white feminists’ voices. Their work is not the end of a conversation, but the beginning of many more conversations that need to be had in our field.

Efe Plange’s article, “The Pepper Manual: Towards Situated Non-Western Feminist Rhetorical Practices,” pushes us to a transnational Black feminist conversation that engages African Feminism and rhetoric that we have not seen in our field before. Her article traces the digital activism technique of creating hashtags and demonstrates an important counter-narrative to the male centered coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and other public health crises in Ghana during March of 2020. Her article aims to start conversations that illuminate gender-based disparities in Ghanaian society through the digital activism of groups like Pepper Dem Ministries. Ronisha Browdy’s “Black Women’s Rhetoric(s): A Conversation Starter for Naming and Claiming a Field of Study” is an effort to demand the field recognize the naming of the work done by Black women towards making space for Black women’s unique ways of being and knowing as an intersectional, interdisciplinary, and rhetorically distinct sub-field called “Black Women’s Rhetoric(s).” Browdy’s overall goal for her work is to further cultivate power for Black women within the field by naming their shared rhetorical efforts as a distinct rhetorical genre and sub-field of rhetorical studies.

In “‘We Want to Be Intersectional’: Asian American College Students’ Extracurricular Rhetorical Education,” Allison Ann Dziuba makes critical interventions into conversations about Asian American identity, intersectionality, coalition, and group dynamics. Through her ethnographic research Dziuba explores the differences between intersectionality as synonym for diversity and intersectionality, as Kimberlé Crenshaw defines it. She expands on the meaning and use of intersectionality by exploring how it works in the Asian American students she studies, as a key part of the metacognitive meaning-making process in both international and Asian American identifying undergraduate student groups. Kim Fain’s “Black Feminist Rhetoric in Beyoncé’s Homecoming” argues that the global reach of Homecoming through its distribution on Netflix calls for formal recognition of Beyonce as a skilled rhetor. Fain analyzes the rhetorical power of Beyoncé’s work and attests that Homecoming is an important rhetorical artifact of Black feminist discourse. Stephanie Jones’ article, “I Heard That: The Sociolinguist Reality of the Black Feminist Afrofuture” traces the interconnectness of science fiction to Black feminist praxis. By exploring popular science fiction and fantasy stories Jones’ work argues that the term Afrofuturism would not exist if it were not for Black feminist discourse. Jones’ article is the winner of the 2021 Geneva Smitherman Award for Research in Black Language, Literacies, Cultures, and Rhetorics.

“Manifesto of a Mid-Life White Feminist Or, An Apologia for Embodied Feminism” by Tracee L. Howell is a much needed disruption to the cis-male patriarchy coded into white feminist rhetoric. Howell suggests that the feminism she was taught in college in the 1980’s duped her and other white women who identified as feminist into thinking there was a universal experience of gender equality. Reflecting on the ways in which she has ignored the intersections between race and gender throughout her life, Howell provides a narrative history that interrogates mainstream white feminism. “On Testimony, Bridges, and Rhetoric” is a webtext created by La-Toya Scott, Kimberly Williams, Andrea Baldwin, and Laura Gonzales. Together, they have crafted a series of letters that unpack their fears and hopes for the field. Through a mix of prose, poetry, video, testimony, and storytelling their webtext calls for a coalition of love in feminist rhetorical studies. Disrupting the notion that white coded feminism is the origin of this discourse community is a heavy task and illuminating histories of oppression within the field is an even heavier task. The articles in this special issue are up for the task and they provide us with a new understanding of the rhetorical tools that sustain diverse histories across time and space.

Works Cited

  • Anzaldua, Gloria, and Cherrie Moraga, Eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color. New York, Kitchen Table Press, 1983.     -return to text
  • Hull, Akasha, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, Eds. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men; But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. New York, Feminist Press, 1993.     -return to text
  • Kendi, Ibram X. “A House Still Divided.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 13 Sept. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/a-house-still-divided/568348/.     -return to text
  • Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist. One World, 2019.     -return to text
  • King, Martin Luther. “ ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech, In Its Entirety.” NPR, 18 January 2010, https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety. Accessed June 6, 2021.     -return to text
  • McKoy, Temptaous. “…Had Y’all Simply Listened to Black Women’: A Call to Intentional Listening and Impactful Anti-Racist Action.” Watson Conference, 22 April 2021, Online, Keynote Address.     -return to text
  • Rhetoric Society of America Board of Directors, “Statement Condemning Insurrectional Rhetoric and Resulting Violence 1/6./21.” Rhetoric Society of America, https://www.rhetoricsociety.org/aws/RSA/pt/sd/news_article/346430/_PARENT/layout_details/false. Accessed June 6, 2021.     -return to text
  • Smith, Barbara, Ed. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York, Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983.     -return to text
  • Thede, Robin, creator. A Black Lady Sketch Show. Issa Rae Productions and 3 Arts Entertainment and Jax Media. 2019-2021.     -return to text
  • Truth, Sojourner, “Woman’s Rights 1851,” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York, The New Press, 1995, pp. 36.     -return to text
  • Walker, Rebecca, “Becoming the Third Wave,” Women: Images and Realities: A Multicultural Anthology, edited by Amy Kesselman, Lily D. McNair and Nancy Schniedewind. Mountain View: Mayfield, 1999, pp. 532-33.     -return to text

Endnote:

We would like to thank Jen Wingard for giving us the opportunity to co-edit this special issue of Peitho. It means so much to us to be a part of the amazing work the journal is doing. Thank you to the phenomenal feminists who reviewed the work published in this special issue. We were heartened by the level of care and thoughtfulness that went into each review. We cannot name the names of these brilliant feminist reviewers because of the double-blind review process. But we just want to say thank you and to let you know we plan to pay the love and labor that forward in the future so that this feminist ethic of care and commitment carries on. Academia would be a better place if all reviewers were like the people who carefully read and offered feedback to the scholars published in this special issue. And finally, we want to thank the artist Geneva Bowers for allowing us to use her “Selfie at the End of the World” as our cover art for the special issue. Her work is breathtakingly powerful and we encourage everyone to go check out more of it on her website: http://www.genevab.com