Welcome to (Adv) Cultural Rhetorics

If any discourse has dominated public consciousness in the last thirty years, it would have to be discourse(s) of multiculturalism.  Elementary schools moved from metaphors of the "melting pot" to metaphors of the "salad bar"; our cultural backgrounds stopped disappearing in some cultural stew and began to be individually valued and recognized as part of a healthy dish where each element worked harmoniously with the others.  Ultimately, by the 1990s, "culture" and "diversity" became concepts that had value in the United States, in large part, because they could be marketed. And now, at the beginning of the 21st century, despite/because of the ubiquitous nature of discourses of race and culture, we find that once again individuals are talking and writing in support of a post-raciality. 

This course focuses on various rhetorics of culture with the goal of understanding how we construct "culture" in language, how we use language to describe and narrate "cultures", and how language helps us to understand ourselves as part of "cultures".  More specifically, this course uses the lens of literacy to understand how cultures are linguistically and rhetorically constructed, how they make meaning to both members and non-members.

To do this work, we will explore the rhetoricaly and discursive patterns at work in various discussions of race/ethinicity and culture more broadly configured.  In addition to racial/ethnic cultural markers, we'll explore intersecting and overlapping markers such as class, gender, and sexuality. Our goal is not to come to some final understanding of what is or isn't culture, or even what "counts" as the proper rhetorical patterns of any particular culture, but to ask the "meta" questions about how cultural rhetorics function, what they do and don't do, how they make and unmake knowledge, and how a study of these meta-discursive projects affect our thinking and writing about cultures.