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ERIC Number: EJ999264
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Dec
Pages: 24
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0010-096X
EISSN: N/A
2012 CCCC Chair's Address: Stories Take Place--A Performance in One Act
Powell, Malea
College Composition and Communication, v64 n2 p383-406 Dec 2012
This is a written version of the address that Malea Powell gave at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, on Thursday, March 22, 2012. This address is a collection of stories. According to her, stories take place. Stories practice place into space. Stories produce habitable spaces. She points out that the discipline founds itself at the heart of the narrative of modernity, and it is deeply mired in the muck of the logic of coloniality. The discipline marks its origins in precisely the same way--and in the same moment--as the colonial matrix of power--in the Renaissance's reinvention of classical Greece and its own middle ages, a reinvention necessary for empire. People in the discipline are part of it, they are part of maintaining it, and now, she believes, they must be part of de-linking and de-chaining those discourses from their imperial designs. When the author is talking about decolonizing the discipline, its scholarship, and its teaching, she is talking about the actual students in the classrooms--their bodies, how their bodies are marked and mobilized in dominant culture, their language and how their language is represented in dominant culture, their lives and how their lives are denigrated as not quite good enough without the fix of Western literacy instruction, how so many of them in the discipline believe students should be "saved" from their lowly, savage lives. Here, the author is talking about making space for them to create tools that will make it possible for them to see the real options open to them--to understand the press of Western fixations with print literacy as not personal, not about each of them at all, but as forces, discourses, they can negotiate, as decisions they can make, and giving them the opportunity to practice that decision-making in their writing classrooms and in their discipline as future valued colleagues. She encourages everyone in the organization to do the thing that they do best--research, teach, mentor, administer in all the inventive and visionary ways that they all say they know how to do better than anybody else--but it must be done in the service of a decolonized, multivocal knowledge world. (Contains 30 notes.)
National Council of Teachers of English. 1111 West Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096. Tel: 877-369-6283; Tel: 217-328-3870; Web site: http://www.ncte.org/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive; Speeches/Meeting Papers
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Missouri
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A