Interfacing Cultural Rhetorics: A History and a Call

Abstract

This essay responds to recent exigencies that ask scholars to honor histories of cultural rhetorics, engage in responsible and responsive cultural rhetorics conversations, and generate productive openings for future inquiry and practice. First, the authors open by paying homage to scholarship and programs that have made cultural rhetorics a disciplinary home. Next, they consider the varied ways in which “culture” and “rhetoric” interface in cultural rhetorics scholarship. The authors provide case studies of how cultural rhetorics inquiry shapes their scholarship across areas of rhetoric, composition, and technical communication. Finally, they close by discussing the ethics of doing cultural rhetorics work.

Notes

1 We are grateful for the helpful feedback from our RR peer reviewers Steven Mailloux and Christina Cedillo, and the support of Louise Wetherbee Phelps and Elise Verzosa Hurley. Our manuscript is stronger thanks to your suggestions.

2 To date, several programs offer optional or required cultural rhetorics courses, including Illinois State University, Northeastern State University, University of Central Florida, and Wayne State University. Rhetoric and composition departments and programs that include “culture” in their titles include: Louisiana State’s Writing and Culture Department; Michigan State University’s Department of Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures; Michigan Technological University’s Rhetoric, Theory and Culture Graduate Program; North Dakota State University’s PhD in Rhetoric, Writing and Culture; and Syracuse University’s Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Doctoral Program.

3 Steven Mailloux’s biography accompanying his 1990 chapter, “The Turns of Reader-Response Criticism,” references an upper-division course at Syracuse University titled “American Cultural Rhetoric.” Also, that year, Mailloux published an article titled “The Rhetorical Use and Abuse of Fiction: Eating Books in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” which examines the “cultural rhetoric of reading fiction” by explaining how literary tropes would shape how audiences read fiction.

4 While we work with/in rhetoric and composition studies (and related areas of inquiry in literacy and technical communication studies), we also note that rhetoric and communication studies scholars also take up cultural rhetorics (see, for example Marouf Arif Hasian and Megan McFarlane’s 2013 Cultural Rhetorics of American Exceptionalism and the Bin Laden Raid).

5 Some of the more explicit articulations of culture and its dimensions and applications to rhetoric and composition are taken up in ethnographic cultural rhetorics work like Ralph Cintron’s Angel’s Town and Julie Lindquist’s A Place to Stand.

6 Malea Powell’s “Stories Take Place,” drawing from American Indian rhetorical traditions, is another recent example that highlights the cultural and rhetorical function of story.

7 Louise Wetherbee Phelps and her colleagues in the Writing Program spearheaded Syracuse University’s proposal for a PhD program in Composition and Cultural Rhetorics, which was implemented in 1997, and which expanded on Mailloux’s articulation of “cultural rhetoric” (Davies; Writing Program Faculty; Mailloux, Reception).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Casie Cobos

Casie C. Cobos is an independent scholar whose research interests include Chicanx, Latinx, and Indigenous studies, disability studies, rhetoric, composition, creative writing, and critical theories. Her most recent work lies at the intersections of Chicanidad, Indigeneity, and mental illness. She graduated from Texas A&M University with a Ph.D. in English and from McNeese State University with an M.F.A. in fiction and M.A. in literature. Her work on Indigenous rhetorics and writing has been published in edited collections.

Gabriela Raquel Ríos

Gabriela Raquel Ríos is an assistant professor of English at The University of Oklahoma. Her research interests are rhetorical theory, Chicana/o/x Studies, American Indian and Indigenous studies, and critical theory. Her most recent publications include a book chapter on sound and literacy in Joy Harjo’s music in Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop, a chapter on mestizaje and its relationship to liberatory movements and decolonial theories in Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy, and an article titled “Cultivating Land-Based Literacies and Rhetorics” in the Literacy in Composition Studies journal.

Donnie Johnson Sackey

Donnie Johnson Sackey is an assistant professor of English at Wayne State University. He is a senior researcher with Detroit Integrated Vision for Environmental Research through Science and Engagement (D•VERSE) and an affiliated researcher in the Writing, Information, and Digital Experience (WIDE) Research Center. He serves as an executive board member of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition. He is also a co-investigator on a grant funded by the Institute for Population Sciences, Health Assessment, Administration, Services, and Economics (INPHAASE), which is a citizen science project that tracks asthma triggers among a cohort of teens living in southeast Michigan.

Jennifer Sano-Franchini

Jennifer Sano-Franchini is an assistant professor of professional and technical writing at Virginia Tech. Her research interests are in the cultural politics of information design, institutional rhetoric, and Asian American rhetoric. Recent publications include Building a Community, Having a Home: A History of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Asian/Asian American Caucus (Parlor, 2017); a book chapter on feminist rhetorics and interaction design in Rhetoric and Experience Architecture (Parlor, 2017); and “What Can Asian Eyelids Teach Us About User Experience Design? A Culturally Reflexive Framework for UX/I Design,” in Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization.

Angela M. Haas

Angela M. Haas is an associate professor of cultural rhetorics and technical communication and serves as graduate director for the Department of English at Illinois State University. Her research and teaching interests include American Indian rhetorics, decolonial methodologies, digital-visual rhetorics, and technofeminisms. Her scholarship has appeared in Computers & Composition, Computers & Composition Online, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Pedagogy, Studies in American Indian Literatures, among other venues. Most recently, she co-edited (with Michelle Eble) Key Theoretical Frameworks for Teaching Technical Communication in the 21st Century (Utah State UP, forthcoming), a collection of social justice approaches to technical communication pedagogy.