| dc.description.abstract | My project argues for critical attention to local rhetorics and characterizes Oklahoma as a unique site for understanding their impact on student writers and writing instruction. Despite rhetorical suppression from dominant historical narratives, Oklahoma has a unique racial history that offers regional insight into how local activist rhetorics cross cultural boundaries and yield cooperative alliances between distinct cultural groups. The theoretical concept that I develop to articulate this phenomenon is “transrhetorical analysis.” This concept has wide applicability. “Transrhetorical” characterizes the movement of rhetorics across multiple location categories – historical, spatial, temporal, cultural, local, regional, national, global, as well as across disciplines. Transrhetorical analysis provides a means of charting cultural literacy activism and activist rhetorical practices, particularly as they surface in local rhetorics that traffic cultural resistance across cultural locations. Ideas, issues, and events engage multiple groups and locations in the collective construction of meaning in the continuation of cultural knowledge. I believe student writing and writing instruction benefits from analyzing local activist networks. Rhetorics, both as messages and the vehicle for messages, necessarily change as a result of local cooperation and contestation, yielding generative and cumulative adaptations, co-optations, and applications. I first analyze 30 undergraduate student interviews I conducted at the University of Oklahoma to establish a gap exists between students’ identities and their local historical knowledge, a gap that, based on theory in the field of Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy and my own interpretation, necessarily impacts their writing and use of rhetoric in local spaces. Students I interviewed, even those who identified as activists themselves, were largely unaware of local activist histories and as a result expressed rhetorical alienation from local spaces and audiences. I also analyze 30 activist interviews in each of my chapters to arrive at local and transrhetorical definitions of activism and resistance particular to Oklahoma. My chosen activist sites, located in Cherokee, Kiowa, African-Native, and African-American communities across Oklahoma, promote distinct cultures endemic to Oklahoma’s sociological, historical, and rhetorical landscapes. My project analyzes activist rhetorical strategies operating at these confluences of local cultural and rhetorical history. Both historical and present-day activists operating at these sites articulate the shared aims of cultural literacy and social justice for their communities, and operate within long-standing rhetorical legacies of cultural literacy activism. I argue understanding their work through a transrhetorical lens addresses the gap arising from student interviews at the same time it sustains and strengthens cultural literacy efforts, especially at sites of rhetorical suppression, silence, and erasure. My work encourages writing and rhetoric faculty to include local rhetorical sites in their curricula to better prepare students to address and persuade audiences, both local and beyond, regarding issues in their own communities. | en_US |
