Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions

Winner of the 2020 CCCC Outstanding Book Award (Edited Collection)

The discipline of composition and rhetoric stands at a crossroad in its pedagogical, research, and public commitments. Decolonial ruptures in writing and rhetoric studies work to build new horizons, new histories, of local knowledges and meaning-making practices that break from Western hegemonic models of knowledge production. This collection functions as one access point within a constellation of such work, forming an ecology of decolonial shifts informed by strategies for potentially decolonizing language and literacy practices, writing and rhetorical instruction, and research practices and methods.

Rhetorics elsewhere and otherwise emerge across a spectrum, from geo- and body politics of knowledge and understanding to local histories emerging from colonial peripheries. Romeo García and Damián Baca offer the expressions elsewhere and otherwise as invitations to join existing networks and envision pluriversal ways of thinking, writing, and teaching that surpass the field's Eurocentric geographies, cartographies, and chronologies.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series
In this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

Romeo García (PhD, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric, Syracuse University) is Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. His research and teaching focuses on multi-sited inquiries into where hauntings (e.g., settler colonialism, coloniality, modernity/coloniality) are at, how they have unfolded at varying scales, and what their consequences are in the everyday. García utilizes settler archives as a powerful medium of and for investigating the role settler literacies, images, and rhetorics have played in constructing settler states, constituting haunted/ing communities, and maintaining wounded/ing spaces and places. 

His research appears in College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Across the Disciplines, The Writing Center Journal, Community Literacy Journal, and constellations. García is co-editor (with Damián Baca) of Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise, winner of the 2020 Conference on College Composition & Communication Outstanding Book Award (Edited Collection). His current interests include the decolonial research paradigm's impact on composition and rhetorical studies; settler archival research; the cultural imaginary of border(ed)landers of South Texas; and community building in and outside of academia. 

Damián Baca is Associate Professor in the Department of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona, and faculty with the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English in Santa Fe, NM. He is author of Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing, a retelling of the story of writing as a technology that emerges not with alphabets in the North Atlantic, but across the Valley of México, long before European territorial annexation and the advent of modernity/coloniality. His most recent publication, Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise, is Winner of the 2020 CCCC Outstanding Book Award (Edited Collection).