[Tlc] L-New Publication in Hmong Studies

[justinm at ucr.edu]

Writing from These Roots
Literacy in a Hmong-American Community
By John M. Duffy

"We are only beginning to recognize the global forces that
have long shaped literacy in the United States. What we need
now is a book that demonstrates how to theorize U.S. literacy
with regard to globalization‘s complex legacy. Writing from
These Roots satisfies this need, and then some. Duffy‘s
careful representation of Hmong literacy narratives is a
remarkable accomplishment in its own right, not least for the
respect he shows the women and men whose stories enable him to
delineate personal, cultural, and national pathways to
literacy. In also documenting Hmong people‘s transnational
pathway to literacy in the United States, Duffy expertly
details the rhetorical means by which literacy can make
legible the self-fashioning of distinct identities against a
historical backdrop bleached by generations of assimilationist
public policy and racist discourse. Duffy‘s insistence that we
think rhetorically about literacy is a call that will resonate
in literacy scholarship for! years to come." --Peter
Mortensen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
2617 Humanities Building
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu