Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long
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their social commitment to complicate the “moral panic” that accompanies outcries over falling literacy rates (21). Yet when modifying attitudes, local often suggests something parochial, bigoted, backwards, even brutal. Genital mutilation is often referred to as a local tradition (e.g., Kissling and Sippel), and George Bush played to rural Ohio’s local attitudes in his speech against same-sex marriage in the summer of 2006 (Gilgoff). Similarly, local attitudes can limit the capacity of a public to invite difference into dialogue. As Cintron observes, “a public sphere cannot ‘think’ beyond what terrifies it” (Angels’ Town 194). The local public framework lets us consider implications of these and other connotations of local and its variations, locale and location, within accounts of ordinary people going public.
Foremost, location signals the material conditions that shape how people go public; location indicates the politics of place. Without such attention to location, it would be tempting to say that local public life is primarily a rhetorical activity that circulates discourse—and to leave it at that. Yet attending to location highlights the complex interplay here between situated activity (Chaiklin and Lave) and discursive space (Hauser Vernacular). For instance, just try to transport Trackton girls’ public performances to the schoolyard in Gilmore’s study where girls engage in a similar public performance. The lewd lyrics, rhyme, rhythm, clapping and jumping—key aspects of jump roping and stepping—are the same. But the politics of place make the activities associated with the plaza and the playground quite distinct. Indulging in their lewd lyrics in the safety of their secluded community, Trackton girls cleaned up their lyrics when jumping rope at school. In contrast, the girls in Gilmore’s study performed their provocative lyrics on the school grounds in overt defiance of the school’s authority, for “doing steps” had been banned. Only in this location did their lyrics and body language assume their full rhetorical force. By attending to location, the local public framework illuminates such differences.
Additional Contextual Factors. Location is only one of the contextual cues that imbue literacies with meaning. For Street, context attends to the ideological forces that were missing from the autonomous model of literacy, including the ways that institutions exercise control and that social hierarchies manage their power (Cross-cultural 7). In the local public framework, context refers to forces that make local publics viable discursive sites for people to go public. These forces include the cultural agency of the black-church-as-institution (Brandt, American 107), the linguistic agency of community residents (Cushman, Struggle 34), and the cultural imaginary of Angelstown’s political landscape (Cintron, Angels’ Town 141). As Street has argued, accounts of these forces say as much about the researcher’s interpretative lens as they do about external reality (Cross-cultural 7). The challenge lies in grappling with how these lenses affect our understanding of situated-public literacies.
Tenor of the Discourse
For the New Literacy Group (NLG), register—or tenor—is a linguistic category referring to the more “typified” choices that together constitute the affective qualities of a discourse (Biber 9). Through its tenor, a discourse encodes attitudes, relational cues, and power differentials—often in highly nuanced ways (Besnier 62–65; Street, Cross-cultural 2). The tenor of a discourse is shorthand for subtle and often complex aspects of discourse typically implied through performance rather than stated explicitly in prose. Its closest correlative would be the term tone when used to describe affective qualities in a piece of writing. However, the difference is that local public discourse transpires in real time and engages people in all their thinking, feeling, reading, writing, doing, valuing complexity. The NLG got interested in describing the tenor of discourses to characterize how situated literacies differ from essayist qualities of standard academic discourse and the “literate activities and output of the intellectual elite” (Street, Cross-cultural 2).
Characterizing the tenor of a discourse, as I have in the following chapters, is a constructive act that asks us to imagine that we can hear first hand the real-time interactions that researchers reconstruct by necessity as text. By attending to cues in the researchers’ descriptions and commentary, we can contrast, for instance, the edgy competitive play of Trackton’s impromptu theater to the literary uplift of Heller’s garden to the bite—tempered by sweetness—of Goldblatt’s community-organizing effort to the threatening hyperbole of Cintron’s shadow system. Approaching the tenor of local public discourse in this way may take some getting used to. But I would hope that you will find doing so to be worthwhile, for these registers offer handles (edgy competitive play vs. literary uplift vs. threatening hyperbole) that succinctly capture some of the most significant differences across alternative versions of local public life. Differences in register also emphasize that for an ordinary person to go public, never is it enough simply to decode or encode text; one must also perform specific literacies in the tenor of a given local public.
Literacies
This part of the framework attends to the literacies that ordinary people use to go public. These are the “technical” repertoires affiliated with discursive activity described in a given account (Street, Cross-cultural 9). Literacies are purposeful—as in Scribner and Cole’s definition of literate practices (236). Literacies help organize public life—as in Heath’s notion of a literate event (386). Literacies employ conventions that people may transform to meet the demands of their own rhetorical goals—as in Flower’s definition of a literate act (Construction 36–37). In sum, literacies organize how people carry out their purposes for going public. As Street would advocate, the framework is also attentive to the ways that that oral and written literacies “mix” in different combinations in different contexts (Cross-cultural 10).
Rhetorical Invention
The last element in the local public framework is rhetorical invention: how a discourse permits people to respond to exigencies that arise within its discursive space.6 Rhetorical invention solves “the problem [. . .] all writers face,” that of “finding subjects to write about and of developing these subjects” (Lauer 1). Here, I pose not a single definition of rhetorical invention but rather a question: what’s the version of rhetorical invention embedded within a given account of local public life? The framework lets us identify both the data and the theoretical explanations driving accounts of rhetorical invention across accounts of local public life.
A key way to compare invention’s generative responses across local publics is to consider its implications—how rhetorical invention translates into choices, practices, and actions. To get at these implications, I conclude each five-point analysis in chapters 4 through 8 with a set of implications and some commentary. In these sections, I consider implications that a given viewpoint holds for some of the most perplexing issues that vex community-literacy studies—issues such as local democracy, program sustainability, the politics of identity, and institutional sponsorship. I draw connections to viewpoints treated in other chapters and to other relevant studies and theories. Foremost, these implication sections focus on “consequences [ . . . for] knowledge making, policymaking, and day to day operations” (Royster and Williams, “History” 564). In doing so, these sections attempt to model one way to “keep[. . .] our intellectual engagements with contentious and complex issues productive” (Royster and Williams, “Reading” 142).
In using the local public framework to review community-literacy studies, I have planned my project to be comprehensive although it obviously is not exhaustive. The measure of the framework’s success will be its ability to spur readers to make connections and comparisons of their own.
In part, the framework affords within-type comparisons, as table 3 demonstrates.
For instance, both Barton and Hamilton’s Local Literacies and Cushman’s The Struggle and the Tools portray the local public as the discursive space where private and public spheres intersect. To depict this intersection, Barton and Hamilton invoke the image of a link and stress movement between the private-public binary; Cushman, invokes a gate and stresses the binary’s outright collapse. By implication, Cushman’s gatekeeping encounter makes salient political dynamics that the link does not. Because gatekeeping encounters are sites of intense political struggle, the institutional literacies required to navigate such