This is the first work to begin to fill a gap: an understanding of discourse aimed to persuade within the Pre-Columbian Americas.
This is the first work to begin to fill a gap: an understanding of discourse aimed to persuade within the Pre-Columbian Americas. The contributors in this collection offer glimpses of what those indigenous rhetorics might have looked like and how their influences remain. The reader is invivted to recognize "the invention of the Americas," providing other ways to contemplate material life prior to contemporary capitalism, telling us about the global from long ago to current global capitalism. This book is the drop that will ripple, creating new lines of inquiry into language use within the Americas and the legacies of genocide, conquest, and cultural survival.
"This collection offers a building block for future scholars to learn, examine, and build work that not only challenges the accepted notion that all rhetoric begins with the Greco-Roman tradition but also seeks to push Native scholarship further into respectful, ethical, and innovative directions." - Marcos Julian Del Hierro, SAIL"Rhetorics of the Americas will potentially be one of the finest contributions to rhetoric, broadly defined, in this decade. This collection extends beyond long standing, abstract postmodern critiques of classical canons of rhetoric to concrete engagements of multiple rhetorical practices from selected cultures in the Americas. Rhetoricians of every stripe, but particularly New Rhetoricians, will find within this collection extensive and newly presented materials. I strongly recommend this book for the voices it exposes from groups of people who have been deemed voiceless in the Euro-American rhetorical imagination, for the further epistemological breadth it will add to the broadening field of rhetoric, for the potential material benefits it offers on a local, national, and global scale pedagogically and politically." - David G. Holmes, Professor of English and Blanche E. Seaver Professor in Humanities, Pepperdine University and Author of Revisiting Racialized Voice
