Books in the Race, Rites, and Rhetoric: Colors, Cultures, and Communication series

African American Women's Rhetoric: The Search for Dignity, Personhood, and Honor deals with the rhetoric of African American women from enslavement to current times, examining slave narratives and contemporary print, music, and other media surrounding the lives of African American women. Covering a variety of specific women and their rhetoric within the context of a historical period, the book provides central themes and strategic and social concerns of African American women and their environment. It frames, in some, cases, the rhetoric of contemporary women in politics and other fields of prominence_including Condoleeza Rice and Barbara Lee, among others. Deborah F. Atwater explores how African women today who engage in speech in the public sphere come from a historical line of active women who have been outspoken in politics, education, business, and various social contexts; heretofore, these women have not been studied in a comprehensive manner. Specifically, how do these African American women discuss themselves, and_more importantly_how do they represent who they are in various communities? How do these women persuade their diverse audiences to value what they say and who they are?African American Women's Rhetoric will be an invaluable contribution to upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in Rhetoric, African American Rhetoric, History, and Women's Studies.

Voz, or voice, thematically structures the twleve original essays of Latina/o Discourse in Vernacular Spaces. This collection extends the study of Latina/o communication, in particular vernacular expressions covering a wide array of inquiries. The essays address such diverse topics as foundational developments, the intersection of culture, theory and disciplinarity, challenges to prevailing ideas about belonging and citizenship, identity tensions in latinidad, marginality, and nationalism, and voices that demonstrate possibilities for solidarity, redefinition and reclamations.