Minor RE/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric) / Edition 3

by Morris Young, Robert Brooke

Overview

Through a blend of personal narrative, cultural and literary analysis, and discussions about teaching, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship shows how people of color use reading and writing to develop and articulate notions of citizenship. Morris Young begins with a narration of his own literacy experiences to illustrate the complicated relationship among literacy, race, and citizenship and to reveal the tensions that exist between competing beliefs and uses of literacy among those who are part of dominant American culture and those who are positioned as minorities.

Influenced by the literacy narratives of other writers of color, Young theorizes an Asian American rhetoric by examining the rhetorical construction of American citizenship in works such as Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s “Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” from Woman Warrior. These narratives, Young shows, tell stories of transformation through education, the acquisition of literacy, and cultural assimilation and resistance. They also offer an important revision to the American story by inserting the minor and creating a tension amid dominant discourses about literacy, race, and citizenship. Through a consideration of the literacy narratives of Hawaii, Young also provides a context for reading literacy narratives as responses to racism, linguistic discrimination, and attempts at “othering” in a particular region.

As we are faced with dominant discourses that construct race and citizenship in problematic ways and as official institutions become even more powerful and prevalent in silencing minor voices, Minor Re/Visions reveals the critical need for revising minority and dominant discourses. Young’s observations and conclusions have important implications for the ways rhetoricians and compositionists read, teach, and assign literacy narratives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809325542
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	02/01/2004
Series:	Studies in Writing and Rhetoric Series
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Morris Young is an associate professor of English at Miami University, where he teaches courses in rhetoric and composition, literacy studies, and Asian American literature.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Note on Hawaiian Words and Usage	xiii
	Introduction	1
1.	Re/Visions: Narrating Literacy and Citizenship	18
2.	Reading Literacy Narratives: Connecting Literacy, Race, and Citizenship Through the Stories of Others	54
3.	Reading Hawai'i's Asian American Literacy Narratives: Re/Visions of Resistance, Schooling, and Citizenship	110
4.	Teaching Literacy Narratives: Reading, Writing, and Re/Vision	141
5.	Personal/Public/Professional: Re/Visions of Research, Teaching, and Citizenship	169
	Coda: American Re/Visions	193
	Notes	201
	Works Cited	207
	Index	217

Editorial Reviews

In Minor Re/Visions, Morris Young patiently examines scholarly discussions of the literacy narrative as a genre that ‘becomes more than just a story about acquiring language and education, more than a nostalgic remembrance or recounting of social and political struggles.’ In so doing, Young helps us understand just how much literacy narratives can contribute to existing representations of reading and writing as key elements in the establishment of cultural citizenship.”—Juan C. Guerra, University of Washington at Seattle

From the Publisher