Writing Across Cultures

This book is about culture shock and the writing process. For a student, the relationship between writing and the challenge of living in a foreign culture may not be obvious. The purpose of Writing Across Culture is to aid the student in documenting and analyzing the connection. If culture can be broadly defined as the unwritten rules of every-day life, one effective method for learning these rules is to write about them as they are discovered. In this way, it is possible to see writing as a tool for cultural inquiry and comprehension, and, hence, an antidote for culture shock. Writing Across Culture encourages its readers to become writers engaged in a dialogue - between the individual and the new society - about everyday cultural differences.

This collection brings together an international, multicultural, multilingual, and multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners in different media seeking to question and re-theorize the contested terms of our title: “woman,” “writing,” “women’s writing,” and “across.” “Culture” is translated into an open series of interconnected terms and questions. How might one write across national cultures; or across a national and a minority culture; or across disciplines, genres, and media; or across synchronic discourses that are unequal in power; or across present and past discourses or present and future discourses? The collection explores and develops recent feminist, queer, and transgender theory and criticism, and also aesthetic practice. “Writing across” assumes a number of orientations: posthumanist; transtemporal; transnationalist; writing across discourses, disciplines, media, genres, genders; writing across pronouns – he, she, they; writing across literature, non-literary texts, and life. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

Ángel Rama was one of twentieth-century Latin America's most distinguished men of letters. Writing across Cultures is his comprehensive analysis of the varied sources of Latin American literature. Originally published in 1982, the book links Rama's work on Spanish American modernism with his arguments about the innovative nature of regionalist literature, and it foregrounds his thinking about the close relationship between literary movements, such as modernism or regionalism, and global trends in social and economic development. In Writing across Cultures, Rama extends the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz's theory of transculturation far beyond Cuba, bringing it to bear on regional cultures across Latin America, where new cultural arrangements have been forming among indigenous, African, and European societies for the better part of five centuries. Rama applies this concept to the work of the Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist José María Arguedas, whose writing drew on both Spanish and Quechua, Peru's two major languages and, by extension, cultures. Rama considered Arguedas's novel Los ríos profundos (Deep Rivers) to be the most accomplished example of narrative transculturation in Latin America. Writing across Cultures is the second of Rama's books to be translated into English.

Writing Across Cultures invites both new and experienced teachers to examine the ways in which their training has—or has not—prepared them for dealing with issues of race, power, and authority in their writing classrooms. The text is packed with more than twenty activities that enable students to examine issues such as white privilege, common dialects, and the normalization of racism in a society where democracy is increasingly under attack. This book provides an innovative framework that helps teachers create safe spaces for students to write and critically engage in hard discussions. Robert Eddy and Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar offer a new framework for teaching that acknowledges the changing demographics of US college classrooms as the field of writing studies moves toward real equity and expanding diversity. Writing Across Cultures utilizes a streamlined cross-racial and interculturally tested method of introducing students to academic writing via sequenced assignments that are not confined by traditional and static approaches. They focus on helping students become engaged members of a new culture—namely, the rapidly changing collegiate discourse community. The book is based on a multi-racial rhetoric that assumes that writing is inherently a social activity. Students benefit most from seeing composing as an act of engaged communication, and this text uses student samples, not professionally authored ones, to demonstrate this framework in action. Writing Across Cultures will be a significant contribution to the field, aiding teachers, students, and administrators in navigating the real challenges and wonderful opportunities of multi-racial learning spaces.

This is a timely and comprehensive study combining various critical approaches to the fiction of Buchi Emecheta, one of Africa's most illustrious and contentious women writers. Feminist (Showalter, Cixous, Kristeva) and postcolonial approaches (writing back) are taken to Emecheta's texts to illuminate the personal, political and aesthetic ramifications of the production of this "born writer." Poststructural programmes of analysis are shown to be less relevant to this writer's fiction than Marxist and Bakhtinian perspectives. Emecheta is shown to be a bridge-builder between two cultures and two worlds in narratives (both challenging and popular) characterized by ambiguity, ambivalence and double-voiced discourse, all of which evince the writer's determination to expose imaginatively the colonial heritage of centre-periphery conflicts, cultural corruption, ethnic discrimination, gender oppression, and the migrant experience in multiracial communities.

An efficient and practical guide for writers who must target their work for another country and culture.

This is a timely and comprehensive study combining various critical approaches to the fiction of Buchi Emecheta, one of Africa's most illustrious and contentious women writers. Feminist (Showalter, Cixous, Kristeva) and postcolonial approaches (writing back) are taken to Emecheta's texts to illuminate the personal, political and aesthetic ramifications of the production of this "born writer." Poststructural programmes of analysis are shown to be less relevant to this writer's fiction than Marxist and Bakhtinian perspectives. Emecheta is shown to be a bridge-builder between two cultures and two worlds in narratives (both challenging and popular) characterized by ambiguity, ambivalence and double-voiced discourse, all of which evince the writer's determination to expose imaginatively the colonial heritage of centre-periphery conflicts, cultural corruption, ethnic discrimination, gender oppression, and the migrant experience in multiracial communities.

Richard H. Brodhead uses a great variety of historical sources, many of them considered here for the first time, to reconstruct the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the middle-class domestic culture of letters, the culture of mass-produced cheap reading, the militantly hierarchical high culture of the post-Civil War decades, and the literary culture of post-emancipation black education. Moving across a range of writers familiar and unfamiliar, and relating groups of writers often considered in artificial isolation, Brodhead describes how these socially structured worlds of writing shaped the terms of literary practice for the authors who inhabited them.