The set of experiences housed at this website is designed to introduce you to the critical practices of Black Rhetoric and Black Language that have channeled and challenged the most pressing social issues of their time. We will follow some of the more traditional practices of African American rhetorical study and closely examine persuasive strategies in multiple Black public texts (song, speech, tweet, meme, painting, letter, essay, etc.) However, we will mostly focus on Black activist groups, community organizers, performers, artists, writers, and speakers to ask ourselves: how do Black Rhetors dream new futures in a world that denies them human life? Our key themes will include: Black gender/ sexuality/ intersectional justice, the sacred-secular continuum, political economies, digital Blackness, Hip Hop, and the history of Black language and literacy. As a community, we identify Black life as infamous and intimate, loud and quiet, past and present, well-known and forgotten and we will challenge ourselves to see and feel how Black Rhetoric helps us achieve more critical visions and praxis for an intersectional racial justice. Various course materials are housed at this website and you, too, will have the opportunity to digitally curate Black Rhetorical histories.
 WORD IS BOND:
The FREEDOM DREAMS of BLACK RHETORIC, LANGUAGE & LIFE (2022) created by Carmen Kynard, PhD |
Theme I The Jump Off... "We Gon Do This Just Like Big Poppa Was Here" Theme II “They Want EFX”: Black Language and Literacy as Centrifugal Force Theme III “How We Get Free”: Black Feminist Rhetorics as Legacy of Abolition Theme IV "All Tea, No Shade": Black Queer Rhetorics for a New Language of Humanness Theme V “Unapologetic” Futures: The Movement for All Black (Digital) Lives in the 21st Century |
