Amardo Rodriguez

New imaginations of difference: on teaching, writing, and culturing

In this essay, we address emerging tensions that are increasingly facing persons, such as ourselves, who choose to reside in borderlands both inside and outside pedagogical settings. Such tensions include matters of location and dislocation, rootedness and uprootedness, diversity and commonality, space and place, time and distance, and so on. The first author enacts her own negotiations of these tensions and offers possible pathways of envisioning human diversity in more heuristic ways. In dialogue, personal narrative, personal history, and classroom re-enactments, we offer a different framework for envisioning difference. Ultimately, our goal is to show one way that we can create the possibility of new imaginations of difference, commonality, diversity, and culture in the college classroom.

Postcoloniality and the Speaking Body: Revisioning the English Oral Competency Curriculum

In this article the authors focus on the potentiality of postcolonial discourses to revision English oral competency courses that form a part of the general education and communication studies curriculum at numerous universities. The authors use as a case, the basic course in public speaking, which is often a mandatory course toward baccalaureate graduation at many universities. The authors offer the beginnings of an outline to help revision the public speaking course and propose that this outline can serve as a conceptual scheme to revision communication studies in ways that reflect and draw upon postcolonial frames and devices. The authors’ broader goal is to show one way that postcolonial work can make a practical disciplinary intervention. Leaning on key themes in postcolonial discourses, the authors outline the ways that this course can be pedagogically revised and suitably historicized. The authors also discuss various ways that a revised course can enlarge the capacity to engage a rapidly changing and evolving world that is laden with both peril and promise, and thereby allow them to more constructively enter and engage political economy, identity, culture, space, place, and history.

Narratives on Longing, Being, and Knowing Envisioning a Writing Epistemology

This is one story about writing. This is also many stories about writing. It contains stories of loss and recovery, of forebodings and longings, of love and tears. This is a story about writing, about the experiences of one person who discovered what the words style, rhythm, and form meant long after she discovered the performance of self in writing.

A president, A scholar, and an immigration bill

ABSTRACT In this paper I look critically at George Borjass scholarship on immigration. Borjas is widely considered to be academias leading immigration skeptic. He consistently contends that low skilled and low educated immigrants (both ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’) hurt the US economy in many different ways, including suppressing the wages of different minority groups. However, a rigorous reading of Borjass scholarship reveals many troubling epistemological assumptions.

A case against colonialism

Thenotion that colonialism is always and everywhere a bad thingneeds tobe rethought in light of the grave human toll of a century of anti-colonial regimes and policies. The case for Western colonialism is about rethinking the past as well as improving the future. It involves reaffirming the primacy of human lives, universal values, and shared responsibilities – the civilising mission without scare quotes – that led to improvements in living conditions for most Third World peoples during most episodes of Western colonialism. It also involves learning how to unlock those benefits again. Western and non-Western countries should reclaim the colonial toolkit and language as part of their commitment to effective governance and international order.

A new rhetoric for a decolonial world

ABSTRACT In this essay, I expand on the notion that defining rhetoric in terms of persuasion promotes violence. I contend that the making of any kind of postcolonial world needs to begin with ending violence, beginning with the most insidious kinds of violence, such as the violence found in too much of our rhetorical and communicational practices. Integral to the making of any kind of postcolonial world needs to be the creation and propagation of a new rhetoric that discourages and delegitimises violence. In this essay, I discuss the beginnings of such a rhetoric and how we can begin to realise and promote such a rhetoric.

On the Rhetoric of Dissenting Judges: Ideology, History, and Politics in Obergefell v. Hodges:

In this article, I identify and look critically at the ideological themes that form the foundation of the dissenting opinions in Obergefell et al. v. Hodges. I contend that these themes speak to much larger issues surrounding the nature of our democracy and why accommodating different ways of being continues to face daunting legal, social, and political hurdles.

Rights, obligations and the making of modern immigration laws

States across the United States are increasingly enacting harsh and punitive immigration laws to encourage what proponents refer to as self-deportation. This paper examines the ideological forces that are nurturing and legitimizing this movement. It specifically focuses on the notion of the good citizen as an ideological construct that inherently makes the undocumented immigrant a threat that must be neutralized for the sake of maintaining law and order. In this way, the good citizen emerges as a natural threat to the undocumented immigrant, as the good citizen is presumably first and foremost obligated to be law-abiding, including upholding laws that aim to push undocumented immigrants to self-deport. This paper looks at how these new immigration laws reify and expand this threat through the notion of good citizenship.

New Imaginations of Difference

The following textual space emerged out of the experience of teaching a class in cross-cultural communication at a large research university in Middle America. I have chosen to write about the experience as an autoethnographic1 amalgamation which includes notes and observations about the class, re-written memories of class interactions as well as my own reflections, revelations, and dialogues with students inside and outside the classroom. The style of writing that emerged as I wrote (and one that I privilege) traverses various genres such as non-fiction, performativewriting, and commentary (Anzaldua, 1987; Denzin, 2002; Pollock, 1998).

Predicaments, Dilemmas, and the Challenge of Knowledge

This article performs a self-inventory about the recursive relationship among theory, the body, and performance studies. It is a provocative call for the recovery of the body. In attempting this recovery, the author articulates the dilemmas and predicaments faced by postcolonial peoples such as myself who try to embody Other kinds of knowledge in the academy. The author concludes the article by proposing that performance studies is the re-constitutive project that can return the body to theory and vice versa.