The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric

The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a comprehensive compendium of primary texts that is designed for use by students, teachers, and scholars of rhetoric and for the general public interested in the history of African American communication. The volume and its companion website include dialogues, creative works, essays, folklore, music, interviews, news stories, raps, videos, and speeches that are performed or written by African Americans. Both the book as a whole and the various selections in it speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, gendered, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslavement period in America to the present, as well as to the Black Diaspora.

Vershawn Ashanti Young works in the following areas of Africana studies: language, gender, performance studies, and rhetoric. He is on faculty in the Department of Drama and Speech Communication at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He has published in such journals as PMLA, African American Review, College Communication and Composition, JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Politics, and Society, and Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society.

Michelle Bachelor Robinson is the director of the Comprehensive Writing Program and a professor of African American Rhetoric at Spelman College. Her research and teaching focus on community engagement, historiography, African American rhetoric and literacy, composition pedagogy and theory, and student and program assessment. She is actively involved in community research, oral history collection, and community writing and serves as a university partner and consultant for the Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance, Inc.