Browsing by Subject "Cultural Rhetorics"
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Item Crossing Borders and Building Alliances: Border Discourse within Literatures and Rhetorics of Color(2012-10-19) Enriquez-Loya, AydeBuilding on Victor Villanueva and Malea Powell's research in rhetoric and writing, in my dissertation I assert that the hierarchical construction of knowledges within literatures and rhetorics has traditionally been utilized to oppress the bodies, histories, and voices of color within both disciplines. I ask that we interrogate the ways in which divisions between communities of color have been rhetorically instated and use the space created by these rifts to build alliances and communities. Centralizing my discourse within Indigenous and Chicana feminist practices, in Chapter I, I define rhetorical borders and illustrate how we can create alliances and provide the methodology for engaging the underlying rhetorics within interdisciplinary works. Practicing this methodology, in Chapter II, I utilize trickster rhetorics in my reading of Wendy Rose's The Halfbreed Chronicles to illustrate how an alliance between rhetorics and literatures facilitates an alternate reading to emerge that defies a colonial gaze and to illustrate how this methodology could be applied to other texts. In Chapter III, I juxtapose Leslie Marmon Silko's rhetorical storytelling structure exemplified in "A Geronimo Story" with Henry David Thoreau's "The Allegash and East Branch" to demonstrate how characters defy their hyperrealist constructions by enacting rhetorics of survivance to both protect people and knowledges and still have their stories heard. In Chapter IV, I argue that while initially the language barrier functions as a rhetorical border that defies history's colonial imposition in Tino Villanueva's Cronica de Mis Anos Peores, he ultimately utilizes it to both recover his childhood, memory and history, and also to create alliances with other native Spanish speakers whose own experiences will facilitate the understanding of the language used. In Chapter V, I argue that the pedagogical implications of bringing together works of literatures and rhetorics into the writing classroom will dramatically impact students' relationship to writing, storytelling, and meaning-making. My dissertation contributes significantly to both disciplines of Rhetoric & Composition and Literatures of Color by redefining the tools and rules by which we can engage a text. Additionally, my dissertation demonstrates that only through mutual use of rhetorical and literary approaches, through an interdisciplinary alliance, can we truly hear all stories.Item Embodied Storying, A Methodology for Chican@ Rhetorics: (Re)making Stories, (Un)mapping the Lines, And Re-membering Bodies(2012-10-19) Cobos, CasieThis dissertation privileges Chican@ rhetorics in order to challenge a single History of Rhetoric, as well as to challenge Chican@s to formulate our rhetorical practices through our own epistemologies. Chapter One works in three ways: (1) it points to how a single History of Rhetoric is implemented, (2) it begins to answer Victor Villanueva's call to "Break precedent!" from a singly History, and (3) it lays groundwork for the three-prong heuristic of "embodied storying," which acts as a lens for Chican@ rhetorics. Chapter Two uses embodied storying to look at how Chican@s are produced through History and how Chican@s produce histories. By analyzing how Spanish colonizers, contemporary scholars/publishers, and Chican@s often disembody indigenous codices, this chapter calls for rethinking how we practice codices. In order to do so, this chapter retells various stories about Malinche to show how Chican@s already privilege bodies in Chican@ stories in and beyond codices. Chapter Three looks at cartographic practices in the construction, un-construction, and deconstruction of bodies, places, and spaces in the Americas. Because indigenous peoples practice mapping by privileging bodies who inhabit/practice spaces, this chapter shows how colonial maps rely on place-based conceptions of land in order to create imperial borders and rely on space-based conceptions in order to ignore and remove indigenous peoples from their lands. Chapter Four looks at foodways as a practice of rhetoric, identity, community, and space. Using personal, familial, and community knowledge to discuss Mexican American food practices, this chapter argues that foodways are rhetorical in that they affect and are affected by Chican@ identities. In this way, food practices can challenge the conception of rhetoric as being solely attached to text and privilege the body. Finally, Chapter Five looks at how Chican@ rhetorics and embodied storying can affect the field(s) of rhetoric and writing. I ask three specific questions: (1) How can we use embodied storying in histories of rhetoric? (2) How can we use embodied storying in Chican@ rhetorics? (3) How can we use embodied storying in our pedagogy?Item Everyday I'm Hustlin? Hiphop Rhetorics and the Art of Makin? Do(2014-02-28) Del Hierro, Marcos JulianThe field of Rhetoric and Composition traditionally centers the Greco-Roman tradition, specifically rhetorics and theories attached to privileged, white males, as the most important voices, while marginalizing rhetorics from other communities such as people of color, women, and queer folks. This dissertation makes interventions in the field of Rhetoric and Composition by privileging rhetorics created and innovated by communities centering non-written texts, non-linearity, everyday practices, and embodiment. It looks at how hiphop produces resistance, survival, agency, and pleasure through everyday practices and rhetorical traditions based in African, Latino/a, and Indigenous ways of knowing. Rooted in sociopolitical resistance and survival against colonial histories of oppression and erasure, I theorize ?tha art of makin? do? as a method employing tactics able to re-imagine, re-purpose, and re-deploy the material and immaterial in accordance to immediate and long-term needs. Hiphop Studies scholar Tricia Rose writes that the ability to manage and navigate the concept of ?flow,? ?layering,? and ?ruptures in line? builds a hiphop methodology for survival that ?suggest[s] affirmative ways in which profound social dislocation and rupture can be managed and perhaps contested in the cultural arena.? This hiphop methodology produces voice, subjectivity, and agency as weapons to combat oppression, challenge discourses, and produce knowledges. I theorize how hiphop rhetoricians employ the art of making do through remixing, pastiche, mimicry, parody, and embodied rhetorics to shift power structures and relationships.Item The Enfreakment of Language: Disability, Eugenics, and Rhetoric(2014-03-31) Wheeler, Stephanie KThis project is motivated by the presence of eugenics in our dominant approaches to meaning-making: what does it look like, and why should we care? To begin to answer these questions, this dissertation works from two concepts: enfreakment ? the identification of elements that are desirable or wanted ? and eugenicist logics, the removal of what is not wanted or deemed necessary for the desired outcome, or alternatively, the replication of the elements that are considered useful. To observe the interaction between the logic of eugenics and enfreakment within ableist systems, this dissertation develops the enfreakment of language, a term that encompasses both the process of enfreakment and the heuristic that allows us to see that process in action. The enfreakment of language uncovers how particular modes of Western and Euro-American meaning-making depend on the logic of eugenics, a dependency that is detrimental to the bodies that become subjected to the power gained through this logic. Focusing on some of the implications of the overlap and interaction between the logics of eugenics and enfreakment within ableist systems, this project demonstrates the operation of eugenics as a logic that motivates discourses around human variation. I offer three examples of representations of disability and eugenics in America to illustrate reproductions of the freak show and eugenicist practices within the production and consumption of the ?abnormal? body. I first show how a system based on eugenicist logic operates by examining how eugenicist logic in the language of U.S. Ugly Laws is mirrored in Nazi euthanasia practices. Next, I illustrate the collapse of a system based on eradication through an examination of representations of Anne Frank, demonstrating how eugenicist logics of Nazi programs dis/able her as the ?face of the Holocaust.? Finally, I look at the attempts to create an alternate, anti-eugenicist system in contemporary public rhetorics through an analysis of Lady Gaga?s references to Nazi eugenics and disability in her work. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Disability Studies is essential if the academy is to account for the bodies and practices that have been erased in the attempt to define categories of ?abnormal.?