Over the past two decades, critical discourse analysis has emerged as a major new multidisciplinary approach to the study of texts and contexts in the public sphere. Developed in Europe, CDA has lately become increasingly popular in North America, where it is proving especially congenial to new directions in rhetoric and composition. This essay…

State, citizen, and corporate readings of a multifarious "Chineseness" fundamentally shape the space where East and West clash in post-Mao China. This dialectic represents a citizen's working-through a crisis of agency and a nation's negotiation of its role within a global economy. Given that China's subaltern literacies operate within…

This article explores the need for alternative rhetorics that address systemic marginalization in American society and in the practice of rhetoric and composition. Specifically, three concepts from queer theory--"intersectionality," "copresence," and "disidentification"--are used as a basis for defining an alternative rhetoric. Then, in the bulk…

This piece continues the work of scholars in the field who look to uncover the ideological and textual practices of our dependence on the construct of "race" through racialized metaphors. Analyzing the rhetoric of race in "College Composition and Communication" and "College English" since 1990, I assert that our categorization of what "race" is…

Asserts that it is as historical creatures that humans have the power of choice; language--the means of naming and renaming, or representing and articulating the options--provides the saving image of transformation. Argues that consciousness of the power of language liberates the imagination, the active mind with its power of memory and…