Jacqueline Jones Royster

History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies.

In the last twelve years several scholars have produced historical accounts of composition studies, seeking to define a field which is still, in many ways, in its infancy. Both James Berlins Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985 and Stephen Norths The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field were published in 1987, just one year short of 25 years from the 1963 date they propose as the birth of composition as a discipline. In 1990 Albert Kitzhabers often copied 1953 dissertation, Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900 was published in book form. In 1991, Susan Miller joined the discussion with Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition, and since then several other accounts, such as John Breretons, The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925 (1995) and Sheryl Fontaine and Susan Hunters edited volume, Writing Ourselves into the Story: Unheard Voices from Composition Studies (1993), have continued to enrich our views and participate in establishing national parameters for the field.

Disciplinary Landscaping, or Contemporary Challenges in the History of Rhetoric

Imagine that we have the privilege of viewing a terrain with its mountains, valleys, rivers and streams, with its flora and fauna, with its creatures that fly, walk, swim, and slither. What does it mean to understand such a geographical space in a richly textured, full-bodied way and to recognize the many ways that we might appreciate and showcase dimensions ofthat view? What we choose to showcase depends materially on where on the landscape we stand and what we have in mind. The imperative is to recognize that the process of showcasing space is an interpretive one, one that acknowledges a view and often re-scopes that view in light of aesthetic sensibilities values, preferences, beliefs. We landscape. We select, focus, and develop, bringing more clearly and vibrantly into view particular features that we frame and foreground, while simultaneously disregarding or minimizing other features and dimensions that we might have selected, developed, and showcased instead. Highlighting landscaping as an interpretive process underscores the extent to which interpretive enterprises are contingent more generally on perception and more specifically on the limitations of perception. In order to make sense of what is before us, we select, focus, and fine-tune the view that we are perceiving or imagining, and we assign to those perceptions value and meaning. We are limited by the choices we make and by the mechanisms and processes we use in shaping them into something that we care about and can persuade others to care about as well. Using landscaping as a metaphor for disciplinary knowledge-making offers a mechanism for understanding two provocative challenges. One is to recognize that whatever we currently know about rhetorical history as a disciplinary landscape is situated on a larger terrain of developed and undeveloped possibilities. A second challenge is to understand on an op-

Human Rights and Civil Rights: The Advocacy and Activism of African-American Women Writers

Royster and Cochran use the words of African American women writers to enrich our view of intersections between American civil rights discourses and the discourses of human rights as a global concept. They focus on both individual and collective activities of the women and contextualize this activism within the larger framework of the rise of individual human rights language in twentieth century international relations.