English Faculty Publications

A generally dated, albeit powerful and persistent, conception of "exile" is banishment from one's own land-a condition often associated with a form of punishment for crimes and political offense in ancient civilizations or, in more recent historical periods, periods of banishment for civil and political offenders to remote areas within a national realm, such as colo­nies in the Americas and Australia, or distant contiguous regions, such as Siberia in the former Soviet Union. In contemporary times, however, exiles are likely to be those who have fled political tyranny and/or economic disenfranchisement or those seeking greater opportunity for intellectual and professional expression.

Four centuries after the 1619 arrival of forty Africans to Jamestown, marking the birth of US slavery, the year 2019 reminds us that the presence, triumphs, and struggles of African-descended people in the Atlantic world represent a history whose roots extend deep and long into the transnational origins of the so-called new world.

In recent years, advancements in digitized records, online ancestry communities, and advancements in DNA testing have paved the way so that almost anyone with the knack and patience for archival research can easily follow a familial line back to the slave-owning or original purchaser of an enslaved relative.

I was drawn to panel A.04 because of my interests in place-based pedagogy. In fact, later that day I gave a presentation on a place-based approach to mobile composition, drawing examples from my teaching (C.05). One of the aspects of this panel that I found particularly engaging was the way that each presenter took a different approach to his or her attention to issues of place. The projects were quite diverse, but there were clearly overlapping connections in terms of how our local geographies, urban spaces, and communities have important implications for the teaching of writing and rhetoric. I walked away from the panel energized with a swirl of ideas for teaching and research.

This essay analyzes the street art project Stop Telling Women to Smile (STWTS) to argue that public art plays an essential, pedagogical role in enhancing literacy education and intercultural communication within our communities. Functioning as both a public pedagogy and community literacy, STWTS demonstrates the power of public art to address injustice and provoke community conversation. To conclude, the essay calls literacy educators to expand the sites of pedagogy to include the everyday literacies students encounter within local public spaces.

Service-learning pedagogies attempt to bridge the often-distant realms of work in the academy with that of the surrounding community. However, in practice, a true partnership among stakeholders can be challenging to achieve. For this project, I invited three former students and the director of a local non-profit to partner with me in an important aspect of academic work: course redesign. Through the lens of standpoint theory, we see that students and community partners hold unique standpoints, yet all too often their voices are marginalized. I assert that their standpoints offer l essential contributions to the course re-design process.

Works of human rights literature help to ground the formal rights system in an informal rights ethos. Writers have developed four major modes of human rights literature: protest, testimony, lament, and laughter. Through interpretations of poetry in Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting, and novels from Rwanda, the United States, and Bosnia, I focus on the mode of lament, the literature of mourning. Lament is a social and ritualized form, the purposes of which are congruent with the aims of transitional justice institutions. Both laments and truth commissions employ grieving narratives to help survivors of human rights trauma bequeath to the ghosts of the past the justice of a monument while renewing the survivors’ capacity for rebuilding civil society in the future. Human rights scholars need a broader, extra-juridical meaning for “transitional justice” if we hope to capture its power.