AFRICAN AMERICAN RHETORIC(S) Edited by Elaine Richardson and Ronald Jackson

African American Rhetorics—study of culturally and discursively developed knowledge-forms, communicative practices, and persuasive strategies rooted in freedom struggles by people of African ancestory in America.
 
Essays in this book attempt to:
a.)   broaden contemporary conceptionalization of AAR
b.)   dileneate debates within our field, African American lit and crit, and African American studies
c.)   explore the development, meaning, themes, strategies, [...]

Royster, Jacqueline Jones Traces of A Stream

 
Methodologies:  “uses trends and practices in rhetorical criticism, discourse analysis, ethnographic analysis” and autobiography to argue for recognition of a long history of AA women rhetoricians for social justice and social action (283).
 
African American elite (well-respected) women used literacy “systematically as a variabl tool” to fight for social justice (5). 
 
Site:  AA women essayists and [...]

Bacon, Jacqueline

“Reinventing the Master’s Tools:  Nineteenth-Century African-American Literary Societies of Philadelphia and Rhetorical Education” Jacqueline Bacon and Glen McCish
 
In this article, Bacon and McCish analyzes six speeches delivered by African Americans at literary society meetings held in Philadelphia to promote rhetorical education in the 1820 and 30s.  Their analyses finds that traditional Anglo-American principles of 19th [...]

Rhetoric and Ethnicity edited by Keith Gilyard

In his preface to this edited collection, Gilyard explains his intention for this collection was to explore “how ethnic rhetorics might function as generative sites of difference, how  they intersect with social movements, how they might shape composition instruction, and how they should related to presentations of the rhetorical tradition” (v).  Ethnic rhetoric is rhetoric [...]

Chapter 5: “Ties that Bind: A Comparative Analysis of Zora Neal Hurston’s and Geneva Smitherman’s Work” by Kimmika L. H. Williams

In this chapter, Williams analyzes the similar rhetorical features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) that Hurston and Smitherman identified in their research nearly forty years apart form one another and situates them within African American Rhetoric(s) (AAR). Their findings, Willliams points out, are consistent with several prevailing theories in AAVE:
• Language spoken by [...]

“Histories in the Spaces Left:African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies”–Jackie Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams

Royster and Williams begin and end this essay with the following aphorism: “History is important, not just in terms of who writes it and what gets included or excluded, but also because history, by the very nature of its inscription as history, has social, political, and cultural consequences.” Royster points out that historical [...]