Octalog IV: The Politics of Rhetorical Studies in 2021

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Notes

1. Epps-Robertson, Candace, Resisting Brown: Race, Literacy, and Citizenship in the Heart of Virginia. U of Pittsburgh P, 2018.

2. See the “About” section for One in An ARMY (https://www.oneinanarmy.org/about) a BTS fandom-driven organization that runs Twitter campaigns to raise funds and awareness around social causes. See, also, the White Paper Project: The Impact of a T-shirt: BTS Meets Politics in a Digital World. https://whitepaperproject.com/, 2018

3. See: @ResearchBTS. (n.d.). Tweets [Twitter profile]. https://twitter.com/researchbts; #BTSSyllabus, compiled by Candace Epps-Robertson (@drEppsRobertson), Jin Ha Lee (@ElegantLogic), and Cassie Nguyen from collective contributions, 2020-present; and The Rhizomatic Revolution Review’s Supplemental Stories (https://ther3journal.com/issue-1/supplemental-stories/).

1. Later, in their introduction to a special issue of Enculturation, Phil Bratta and Malea Powell discuss the importance of cultural rhetorics as an embodied practice: “If we proceed from the already-voiced assumption that all rhetoric is a product of cultural systems and that all cultures are rhetorical (i.e., they have meaning-making systems that are meaningful and that can be traced synchronically, diachronically, and a-chronically), understanding the specificity of the bodies and subjectivities engaged in those practices must be central.”

^1. I began my conference talk with the reminder that all universities on Turtle Island are on Indigenous land, which means settler scholars are responsible for building relationships with, learning from, and working in coalition with Indigenous communities where we live and labor.

^2. See also (Luibhéid and Cantú; Alexander; Gopinath; Shah).

^3. Of course, also Aja Martinez’s body of work.

^4. As explored by Pritchard in Fashioning Lives and modeled by Alexis Pauline Gumbs et al.’s work.

^5. Nash; See also Lorde; Sandoval; hooks; Gumbs et al.; Pritchard.

^6. Advice given to me by Toni Jensen, for whom I am ever grateful.

^1. The recent literature on rhetoric’s exclusions is vast and growing (to say nothing of the backlog). I don’t have room for a comprehensive accounting, even if I had the audacity to attempt one, but I’ve found a number of recent examples compelling, often uncomfortably so (for example, Alexander and Wallace; Báez and Ore; Chávez; Inoue; Martinez; Patterson and Spencer; Wanzer-Serrano).

^1. For a fuller theorization of this dynamic, see Glenn.

^2. Wan offers another critical perspective on normative claims about citizenship and writing instruction.

^3. I am grateful to have learned about these archival materials from the work of F. Griffin and Katz.

^4. Other articulations of intersectionality as developed by Black feminist and queer theorists include Cooper; Crenshaw; Ferguson; C. Griffin and Chávez; Pritchard, “‘As Proud’”; Taylor.

^1. The speeches from Octalog 1 in 1988 remind us of how classical rhetoric was enlisted to claim scholarly standing for the teaching of writing. The second Octalog in 1997 showed our increasing critical awareness and the deepening impact of feminism. The third in 2010 belatedly acknowledged the diversification of the discipline by including disabilities scholar Jay Dolmage and the first panelists of color (Ralph Cintron, Ronald Jackson, LuMing Mao, and Malea Powell). Powell spoke pointedly to the belated recognition that our histories were not speaking to our times in ways that recognized the traditions of indigenous and minoritized peoples.

^2. At the same time that Theresa Enos was orchestrating the Octalogs, she was surveying the curricula of the proliferating numbers of graduate programs. The history of rhetoric was a foundational study in the first programs established in the late 70s and early 80s, with the primary purpose being to prepare teachers of writing, as discussed in Jillian Skeffington’s review of the surveys conducted in 1987, 1993, 2000, and 2010 (Rhetoric Review 30.1, 2010). The number of graduate programs doubled between 1988 and 1997, and curricula expanded beyond professionalizing the teaching of composition. Theresa helped dedicate the second Octalog to Jim Berlin’s passing after he had helped to make the first Octalog an historic moment. Theresa has now followed Jim into the great hereafter. The other original Octalog panelists are also gone from the field. Most who spoke at the second Octalog are now following them into retirement.

^3. In my response to the third Octalog in 2010, I discussed how our historical perspective shifted as we expanded our frame of reference from the history of rhetoric to the histories of rhetorics. In 2011, all the first participants in the Octalogs were invited to offer further reflections on our evolving historiographies. I titled my reflection “Running Out of Time” because the scholarly conversations at CCCCs and elsewhere seemed to be increasingly out of sync with the financial collapse that millions of working people were facing. The conference program did not include discussions of the collapse of state funding that was increasing student debt, adjunct hiring, and the exodus from humanities majors (RR 30.1, 2011). A decade later, the disconnect between our historic times and our historical studies seems to be even more notable and less noted—with the powerful exception being discussions of antiracist activism, pedagogies, and histories.