Writing from these roots: Literacy, rhetoric, and history in a Hmong-American community
Author(s):
Duffy, John Michael
Format:
Thesis
Degree granted:
Ph.D.
Publisher:
Ann Arbor : The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2000.
Pages:
463
Language:
English
Abstract:
My dissertation, “Writing from These Roots: Literacy, Rhetoric, and History in a Hmong-American Community,” is a historical study of the forces that shape the development of literacy across cultures. The dissertation is meant to extend existing theories of literacy development as articulated in composition studies, education, linguistics, and anthropology. While these disciplines typically locate the development of written language within the constructs of individuals or supposedly bounded cultures, I argue that theories of literacy development must be viewed, instead, as an outcome of relations and competitions among powerfully shaping rhetorics, or symbolic narratives that work to structure thought and frame conceptions of identity. This view, which I call a “rhetorical approach to literacy development,” examines the ways in which such rhetorics work to influence aspects of human beliefs, values, and actions, including the understanding and practice of literacy. The dissertation examines the rhetorics that have influenced the literacy development of the Hmong of Laos, a people who came to the United States as political refugees from the Vietnam War, and whose language had no widely accepted written form until recently. Drawing upon life history interviews that I conducted over a two-year period in a Hmong community in Wisconsin, I investigate the rhetorics that have motivated Hmong literacy development in Laos, including the rhetorics of schooling, CIA-sponsored military activity, and missionary Christianity, and the rhetorics shaping Hmong literacy development in the U.S., including those of public schools, Christian sponsors, and the workplace. Yet while “Writing From These Roots” examines how rhetorics have shaped Hmong literacy development, the dissertation also consider the ways in which Hmong writers have appropriated literacy and used it to fashion new rhetorics of history and experience.