CFP: A Brief History of Rhetoric

A Brief History of Rhetoric in the Americas: 3113 BCE to 2012 CE

Damián Baca & Victor Villanueva, editors

Call for Contributors

Focusing on rhetoric outside of the dominating Greco-Latin canon, this collection will examine rhetorical practices and traditions of the indigenous pre-Columbian past and their legacies in the global American present as well as the rhetorical legacies wrought by other colonized peoples in the Americas. The timeline referenced in our title, for example, follows the Epi-Olmec and Maya calendar, thereby evoking indigenous chronologies and cosmologies that we hope our contributors will engage. The purpose of this collection will be to look to the past and present simultaneously, as many of these rhetorics are in use today in various contemporary configurations.

Submissions might address issues of historiography, linguistic/rhetorical migrations, cartography, multiple writing systems, material culture, the impact of Western expansion and global-colonial power on rhetorical practices, etc.

We are especially interested in essays dealing with rhetorical traditions, voices, audiences and contexts in North American, Mesoamerica/Anahuac/Mexico, Sub-Arctic, Caribbean Islands/Arawak/Antilles, Austronesia (Philippine, Hawaiian, and Pacific Islands), and other "American" colonial peripheries.

In particular, we invite submissions that focus on pictographic, ideographic, logographic, iconographic, kinetic, material, and so-called "visual" rhetorics in the Americas, and/or those that root their theoretical/methodological approaches in rhetorics that do not derive from Sumerian or Egyptian (i.e.: Greco-Latin) traditions.

Submissions Process
Please send a 250-500 word abstract of your contribution to Damián Baca via e-mail by May 3, 2008.

If your contribution is accepted for the volume, we anticipate a deadline of August 1, 2008 for full manuscripts (no longer than 10,000 words including notes and reference matter).

Contact Information
Damián Baca, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Rhetoric & Writing
Chicano-Latino Studies
baca@msu.edu
Michigan State University