Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies

This book brings together Latinx scholars in rhetoric and composition to discuss important conceptual terms that have been misused or appropriated by forces working against the interests of minority students. In educational and political forums, rhetorics of identity and civil rights have been used to justify ideas and policies that reaffirm the myth of a normative US culture that is white, Eurocentric, and monolinguistically English. These attempts amount to a de facto project of neo-colonization, if “colonization” is understood to include not only the taking of land but also the taking of culture, of which language is a crucial part. The authors introduce the concept of epistemic delinking and argue for its use in conceptualizing the kind of rhetorical and discursive “decolonization” we have in mind, and offer examples of this decolonization in action through detailed work on specific terms. Contributors to this volume will draw on their training in rhetoric and on their own experiences as people of color to reset the rhetorical agenda for the future. They theorize new key terms to shed light on the great varieties of Latinx writing, rhetoric, and literacies that continue to emerge and circulate in the culture at large in the hopes that the field will feel more urgently the need to recognize, theorize, and teach the intersections of writing, pedagogy, and politics.