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1 Prologue: The Rhetoric of Engagement The call to social, political, and cultural engagement has exerted a magnetic influence on the emerging field of rhetoric and composition, which responded with not one but a family of rhetorics. Since the 1990s, the dominant paradigm within this academically sponsored rhetoric of engagement has been the discourse of cultural critique. However, its roots go back to a powerful historical tradition of engaged rhetors that claimed the Hebrew prophets and Jesus, as well as Karl Marx, Martin Luther King, and Paulo Freire. The work of more contemporary academic writers has modeled a powerful rhetoric of resistance that begins in a profound critique of forces that oppress and dehumanize; of forces that are embedded in the complacent normalcy of the status quo. It is a discourse that is desperately needed. And the assertive, deconstructive discourse of academic cultural critique has brought socially and politically attuned thinking into classrooms and scholarship—in a way that gentle persuasion would have never achieved. It has created a powerful art, a rhetorical techné of analysis that borrows tools from literary criticism, history, and sociology. Its complex discourses, built around deconstruction and critique, theorizing, antifoundational and counterhegemonic resistance, tend to define themselves in terms of what they stand against—oppression, power, patriarchy, ideology. The situation demands no less. At the same time, the broader, historical tradition of engagement , in which critique is rooted, was also marked by an insistent vision of social, political, and spiritual transformation. And that vision demands even more of us. The effort to discover and describe, to enact and revise what a transformative more could be is one of the most energetically exploratory agendas to emerge in our field. Working to integrate theory and practice, this transformative experiment is showing up in critical pedagogy, multicultural studies, service learning, in public rhetoric research, in special interest groups linking Prologue 2 theory to local action, and in web sites and list serves drawing students and citizens, public intellectuals and ordinary people into rhetorical democracy (Shor & Pari, 1999; Anzaldua, 1987; Deans, 2000; Weisser, 2002; Cushman, 1999; Roberts-Miller, 2004; Hauser & Grim, 2004). What these experiments seek is a way to conduct a clear-eyed, historically grounded, intellectually rigorous critique of others and ourselves and at the same time to imagine and act on a vision of transformation. Such a vision would draw us by its rich articulation of possibility, its self-critical negotiation with experience, and its feet-on-the-ground willingness to act, revise, and act again. The rhetoric of engagement depends on a family of discourses, each able to do certain things uniquely well and each ideally aware of its limitations (Long, in press). The dominant discourses of engagement in composition have indeed taught our students and us how to speak up as an expressive practice and how to speak against something with the techniques of discourse analysis and critique. But this is not enough, for they do not teach us how to speak with others or to speak for our commitments in a nonfoundational way. It is here in exploring such a discourse with others and for a revisable image of transformation that community literacy tries to make its contribution to a new rhetoric of public engagement. Engaging with Difference The search for more public forms of engagement has pushed many scholars and students in rhetoric and composition studies into unfamiliar territory. Once one steps beyond academic analysis and critique, perhaps the most significant aspiration and dilemma is how to relate to others—especially to marginalized or culturally diverse “Others”—across chasms of difference. For educators, the problem is not merely theoretical; it means figuring out how to construct a rhetorical space that can support transformative relationships. The work emerging in classrooms, communities, and publics offers different models of this space but some shared insights. This space must be both political and personal—an encounter with the lived reality of others and a caring search for understanding, translated into a commitment to change (Cushman, 1998; Goldblatt, 2005; Schutz & Gere, 1998). To rest in the mere personal puts one on the slippery slope of philanthropy and charity that preserves the status of giver and receiver, expert and client (Flower, 1997a; Gabor, 2006). It allows one to ignore or evade the larger social systems and logics that create a world of “Others” in the first place. So engagement with difference can start in a contact zone where differences are made visible and...

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