Hi Folks,
I’m pleased to share the news that a new book has been added to the WAC Clearinghouse (https://wac.colostate.edu). This book appears in the International Exchanges on the Study of Writing book series, which is edited by Steven Fraiberg, Joan Mullin, Magnus Gustafsson, Anna S. Habib, and Terry Myers Zawacki.
An Imagined America: Language, Literacy, Identity, and Coloniality at Syrian Protestant College, 1866–1920
By Lisa R. Arnold
An Imagined America presents a historical, transnational, translingual, and decolonial perspective on questions of identity, literacy, language, culture, and citizenship. In examining a variety of English- and Arabic-language archival documents from the founding of Syrian Protestant College in 1866 (today the American University of Beirut) until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920, Lisa R. Arnold shows how transnational and translingual negotiations among faculty, students, and administrators, as well as the local and regional community, produced a tenuous and sometimes unsettling vision of America for foreigners and locals alike. As her account shows, transnational and translingual discourses provide the backdrop and motive for the assertion of coloniality in contexts of literacy education such as that of Syrian Protestant College. An Imagined America allows scholars and educators in rhetoric and writing studies, education, and related fields to consider how literacy education in English has, and often continues to, construct an imagined America that is both grounded on and reproduces colonial epistemology. Such constructions work to uphold exclusionary practices that are all too vivid in our world today.
You can find the book at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/international/imagined/. This book, like other books published by the Clearinghouse, will be available in a print edition from University Press of Colorado in the coming months. Thanks to Lisa for her work on the book and for her decision to share it with us as an open-access publication. Thanks as well to the anonymous peer reviewers who contributed to its development.
All the best,
Mike
Mike Palmquist
Publisher, The WAC Clearinghouse
Emeritus Professor and Emeritus Associate Provost
Colorado State University
Email: Mike.Palmquist
