ENGL 680 Minority Rhetorics 22 Feb. 2011

“the politics of rhetoric and its effects on people of color.”

“Somewhere along the way I had thought it would be a good idea to have a collection of essays that would depict how the struggles of people of color continue after goals are reached, after ‘making it’” (vii). “Praxis […] provide[s] a problematic based on sets of experiences: an experience which leads to a theory, a theory that recalls an experience; reflections on speculations to polemics to reflections” (xvii).

Getting a degree, then another, and another Being published Defending your thesis, then your dissertation Teaching first-year composition Having the opportunity to teach other courses Are there benchmarks for what was lost?

“It wasn’t the story that upset me. There were too many parallels to my own. It was the melancholy, the ideological resignation, the way he seemed not to see biculturalism is as imposed as assimilation” (39). Biculturalism means “the tensions within, which are caused by being unable to deny the old or the new” (39). Rodriguez has not assimilated, but has achieved “racelessness” by distancing himself from the collective.

Borderland theories represent a “notebook metaphor where teachers too can often see themselves,” but a metaphor that is “potentially delimiting, not providing for the differences between teachers and students.” This “talk of margins and borders is in keeping with the need to acknowledge what can’t be denied, while denying that it is structural […] it involves class, and something like a caste system” (57).

Villanueva addresses such work as “a matter of rhetoric […] perhaps the means […] by which change can begin to take place,” and he locates the site for building this counterhegemony within “the classroom […] an ideal site in which to affect change; the classroom, where we come in contact with so many, the many who in turn will come in contact with many more” (121).

“Traditional intellectuals pass on the ‘truths’ of the State, and the dominant hegemony in their work with subaltern institutions, the institutions of civil society” (130). They maintain the status quo. Organic intellectuals “remain tied to the classes from which they originated, even if they work outside their original communities. [They…] remain organic if the functions they undertake have them conceptualizing and articulating the social, economic, and political interests of the group or class from which they came” (129).

New Intellectuals represent a distinct position between the organic and the traditional, a third position composed from “the ideal, a fusion of the organic and the traditional, actively engaged in the rhetorical enterprise of a counter hegemony” (131). New intellectuals promote “Gramsci’s educational scheme […] a critical cultural literacy” (136).

The process of academia: severs ties by moving one across country to places with minimal if any diversity demands one’s time and energy so that he/she has little time to foster new relationships or maintain old ones maintains teaching assistants at the poverty-level wages controls who gains entrance to these academic communities and limits their diversity How does one become a new intellectual when everything seems so stacked toward developing into a “traditional intellectual?”