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African American Rhetoric in the Field of Composition Studies: An Annotated

Bibliography

This annotated bibliography was constructed in order to be as inclusive of the history of

African American rhetoric as possible as well as to include arguments regarding and current
debates on African American rhetoric in the composition classroom. Keith Gilyards African
American Contributions to Composition Studies and Jacqueline Jones Roysters and Jean C.
Williams History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of
Composition are excellent starting points for those unfamiliar with the topic; both of these
articles offer in-depth historical, critical, and contextual analysis of the major contributions by
African Americans to the field of rhetoric and composition, specifically in reference to many pre20th century figures which have traditionally been left out of the larger canon of rhetoric and
composition studies.
I also aimed to include articles that go further into varied African American identities,
including Elaine Richardsons Identities on the Ground and All Around: African American
Female Literacies, Critical Black Discourse Studies, Rap, and Rhetoric and Composition and
Vershawn Ashanti Youngs Straight Black Queer: Obama, Code-Switching, and the Gender
Anxiety of African American Men in order to not overly reduce African American identity to
the simple parameters of race. In addition to these two articles, David G. Holmes Fighting
Back by Writing Black: Beyond Racially Reductive Composition Theory also serves to offer an
argument regarding the plurality of African American identities and perspectives in both the
classroom as well as in rhetoric and composition as a whole.

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Though most of these articles do share a common argumentthat African American

dialect deserves to be, in some way, introduced and incorporated into the composition classroom
very few of them offer tangible pedagogical strategies that would work to successfully
demonstrate what incorporating Ebonics/African American Vernacular English/Black English
Vernacular into the classroom would look like, specifically. Lisa Delpits article, The Politics of
Teaching Literate Discourse, as well as Staci M. Perryman-Clarks African American
Language, Rhetoric, and Students' Writing: New Directions for SRTOL are perhaps the most
luminary in terms of outlining precise teaching strategies to serve this purpose. It is also
interesting to note the variance, as seen above, in terms/acronyms assigned to define the African
American dialect in language and composition studies. Though Ebonics, used primarily in the
earlier articles, seems to have fallen out of rhetorical fashion, both African American Vernacular
English (AAVE) and Black Vernacular English (BEV) are still employed by authors throughout
the more recent articles cited in this bibliography.
Perhaps the final point of interest I would like to draw attention to would be the disparity
in evaluation in reference to fellow researchers on African American rhetoric. For example, both
Lisa Delpits and Elaine Richardsons articles reference James Paul Gees article, Literacy,
Discourse, and Linguistics, and both women share similar viewpoints and arguments regarding
the recognition of African American rhetoric (or, as Holmes would assert, rhetorics) in the
composition classroom; however, while Delpit takes particular issue with certain aspects of
Gees article, Richardson exalts others, causing one to ask how definitive the interpretation of
Gees article can be. Similar disparities can be found throughout these articles in authors varied
references to bell hooks and Geneva Smitherman, among others, signifying that the academic

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conversation regarding the issue of African American rhetoric is hardly resolved and still
evolving.
Ultimately, this annotated bibliography, though certainly not exhaustive, was designed in
order to offer a range of many viewpoints, arguments, and foremost scholars within the subject
of African American rhetoric. By exploring these articles in depth, one should get a fairly wellrounded idea of the development of the scholarly discussion of African American rhetoric in the
field of rhetoric and composition as well as where this discussion is headed in the academic
realm.

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African American Rhetoric in the Field of Composition Studies: An Annotated Bibliography

Delpit, Lisa. The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse. Other People's Children: Cultural
Conflict in the Classroom, The New Press, New York, NY, 1995, pp. 152166.
This article is an explicit response, Delpit notes, to James Paul Gees article, Literacy,
Discourse, and Linguistics, in which Gee presents a view of discourse as determinedly
tied to the socioeconomic station in which people are born. Delpit fervently disagrees
with this assertion, arguing that there are many instances in which individuals of color,
specifically, have successfully engaged and become proficient in discourses outside of
their inherited socioeconomic status, presenting several examples which all share a
common theme: teachers dedication to addressing individual needs for higher and/or
more socially accepted forms of discourse than those in which they were born.
Ultimately, Delpit argues for several tactics teachers must utilize in order to effectively
teach marginalized students these discourses without further isolating and/or oppressing
them: teachers must validate students home languages and explicitly incorporate these
languages within the academic discourse present in the classroom as well as candidly and
openly acknowledge the inherent inequality of opportunity that derives from the
hierarchal nature of academic/formal vs. informal languages within the academy.
Gilyard, Keith. African American Contributions to Composition Studies. College Composition
and Communication, vol. 50, no. 4, June 1999, pp. 626644.
Gilyards article specifically aims to illuminate overlooked African American
contributions to the field of rhetoric and composition. He highlights literary genres
created by African Americans that served to diversify literature and thus rhetoric and
composition used to evaluate such literature. Gilyard also outlines the major
achievements made by African Americans explicitly within the institution and pedagogy
of rhetoric and composition, such as: the emphasis on humanistic evaluations of
composition; the creation of the College Language Association; and the CCCC position
statement which would become the highly influential and essential monograph Students
Right to Their Own Language. Ultimately, Gilyards article aims to not only present
historical context of African American contributions to composition but also to outline
the manifestations of specific theoriessuch as J. Newton Hills insistence on the
recognition of students backgrounds in rhetorical performance and Geneva Smithermans
pedagogical writings regarding the reevlauation of what is considered correct grammar
that would come to the forefront of modern rhetoric and composition studies and that
are still being debated today.
Holmes, David G. Fighting Back by Writing Black: Beyond Racially Reductive Composition
Theory. Race, Rhetoric, and Composition, Edited by Keith Gilyard, Boynton/Cook
Publishers, Inc., Portsmouth, NH, 1999, pp. 5366.
Holmes argues that a common strategy in discussing African American rhetoric is to
reduce the concept to strict and ultimately exclusive terms of what qualifies as African
American rhetoric; this is, Holmes argues, perhaps the primary issue in the pedagogical

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attempts by composition teachers in teaching African American students. He raises the

question of how to, within the composition classroom, simultaneously affirm the dialect
of those students who associate themselves with/consider themselves familiar with Black
English Vernacular (BEV) as well as African American students who do not have any
particular associations with BEV. Holmes argues that essential to the solution of this
problem is pluralizing the current singular concept of African American rhetoric; that is
to say, affirming the existence of African American rhetorics. Ultimately, Holmes asserts
that adopting a non-reductive view of the classification of African American rhetorics
allows for students in composition classrooms to see race as serving rhetoric rather than
simply defining or signifying a type of rhetoric, thus undermining traditional institutional
marginalization of BEV and other dialects.
Perryman-Clark, Staci M. African American Language, Rhetoric, and Students' Writing: New
Directions for SRTOL. College Composition and Communication, vol. 64, no. 3, Feb.
2013, pp. 469495.
Perryman-Clark presents the results of three of her African American students in order to
highlight the successful pedagogical strategies she employed in order to practically
interpret the CCCCs Students Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) doctrine.
Perryman-Clarks college course aimed to make tangible the pedagogical issue of
applying SRTOL in the classroom by focusing on the rhetorical use of dialect,
specifically Ebonics, and the intentionality of its use, ultimately evaluating the efficacy of
this intentionality in reference to strategies such as rhetorical analysis, illustration of
code-switching and cultural ideas, and the use of Ebonics across various composition
genres. Though she does note in her conclusion that Ebonics was more often (and,
potentially, more effectively) used in non-traditional compositional genres, such as digital
texts and texts rooted in an oral discourse, Perryman-Clark ultimately concludes that
instilling in her students the confidence in their ability to make conscious rhetorical
choices within academic composition is the first step in a successful pedagogy working
towards affirming SRTOL in the classroom.
Richardson, Elaine. Identities on the Ground and All Around: African American Female
Literacies, Critical Black Discourse Studies, Rap, and Rhetoric and
Composition. College Composition and Communication, vol. 61, no. 2, Dec. 2009, pp.
456463.
Richardson asserts that the composition classroom has historically had a narrow goal,
namely to assimilate all students into using rhetorical and compositional parameters
defined by an elite, white world. She argues that the field of composition and rhetoric has
the potential to stagnate by not recognizing and engaging in what she deems critical
literacy, which is the active critiquing of various discourses by taking into account the
cultural and economic factorssuch as racethat are intrinsic to the production and
assessment of those discourses. She highlights black female Hiphoppas as an example
of a literacy that addresses these factors and contains within itself diversity, thus both
addressing and mirroring the diversity that is found in the classroom. Richardson ends by
arguing that, if the composition classroom does not begin to recognize sociocultural

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factors in its modes of teaching and evaluating discourse as it relates to rhetoric and
composition, it will become ineffective, outdated, and irrelevant to its constituents who,
she insists, will only become more ethnically and culturally diverse.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Jean C. Williams. History in the Spaces Left: African American
Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies. College Composition and
Communication, vol. 50, no. 4, June 1999, pp. 563584.
Royster and Williams begin by highlighting that the mainstream/well-known narrative
histories of the creation of the field of rhetoric and composition overwhelmingly exclude
the knowledge of achievements by African Americans in the field. The authors assert that
this trend carries over into the classroom in reference to the lack of African American
student-centered narratives and the historical trend of evaluating only the basic writers
in the African American community rather than those in the community that have been
successful. Ultimately, Royster and Williams outline a history of rhetorical and
compositional achievement by African Americans starting in the 19th rather than 20th
century as well as propose specific guidelines for rectifying the tendency of suppressing
marginalized narratives in the field by: actively re-categorizing what are considered
official (or mainstream) historical narratives; a restructuring of the critical and
contextual framework of field histories, allowing for more diverse viewpoints; and
combining these two strategies in order to develop knowledge and pedagogy aimed at
higher levels of success for African American students.
Smitherman, Geneva. Language and African Americans: Movin On up a Lil Higher. Journal of
English Linguistics, vol. 32, no. 3, 2004, pp. 186196.
After offering a brief historical overview of scholastically oriented judicial and cultural
advancements in the recognition of African American Language (AAL) rhetoric,
Smitherman outlines the two primary issues facing AAL linguists and pedagogues in
establishing AAL as worthy of further study. Specifically, Smitherman discusses the
competing academic factions in regards to the language-dialect debate, the question of
whether AAL is a divergent subset of the English language or its own independent
language classification; and also the recognition or lack thereof of AAL as a linguistic
culmination of cultural and political constructs surrounding those who are AAL speakers.
Smitherman argues that, because AAL is not only distinct it its grammatical and
syntactical structure but also in its specific and distinct sociocultural discursive usage, it
is its own distinct language worthy of elevation to a more serious conversation, not only
within American linguistics but also in global multilingualism studies.
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. Straight Black Queer: Obama, Code-Switching, and the Gender
Anxiety of African American Men. PMLA, vol. 129, no. 3, 2014, pp. 464470.
Young utilizes an article critical of President Barack Obamas supposedly effeminate
rhetorical and linguistic strategies to illuminate the specifically masculine African
American cultural issue of the association of intellectualism with femininity. Via this
example, Young argues that the institutional emphasis on code-switchingspecifically, in

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relation to African American students, the forced assimilation of black students into using
Standard American English (SAE) in order to succeed both scholastically and
professionallyonly further emphasizes African American Vernacular English (AAVE)
as an inferior form of rhetoric, thus marginalizing and discouraging African American
students from achievement in the academic realm. In place of code-switching, Young
advocates for code-meshing, a practice in which SAE and AAVE are more fluidly fused
in discourse within the academy. Young ultimately concludes that by bridging the divide
between (what is currently considered) formal and informal language and legitimizing
AAVE in an academic setting, the stereotype surrounding AAVE as inadequate will be
eroded, thus creating an inclusive and therefore more effective learning atmosphere for
male African American students as well as all African American students.