Race, Rhetoric, and the Contest over Civic Education

It is one of the more revealing paradoxes in contemporary liberal arts education that recent cutting-edge discourses proffered in the service of democratic renewal—discourses frequently excoriated as trendy, postmodern, or ultra-radical by academics and the popular press alike—share many of the assumptions of some of the oldest theoretical justifications for higher education in America. Three such recent contributions—Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, Keith Gilyard’s Race, Rhetoric, and Composition, and Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham’s Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial—are primarily concerned with reasserting the university’s role in producing a literate and critical civic body in the interest of nurturing and sustaining a vibrant democratic culture of politics. Freire’s collection of essays, published after his death in 1997, speaks to the necessity of an educational discourse steeped in democratic principles at a time when neoliberal agendas redefine public goods (such as schooling) as private interests, and thereby suggest that “we have no choice but to adapt both our hopes and our abilities to the new global market” (Aronowitz, Introduction 7). The contributors to Gilyard’s edited volume theorize race both at the level of classroom practice and in the broader professional conversations and debates that animate the field of rhetoric and composition.