Morris Young

Position title: Charles Q. Anderson Professor of English

Pronouns: He/him/his

Email: msyoung4@wisc.edu

Address:
6187C Helen C. White Hall

Research Interests

Writing and identity, the intersections of literacy and rhetorical studies, and Asian American literature and culture.

Degrees and Institutions

  • Ph.D., The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • M.A., The University of Hawai‘i at Manoa
  • B.A., The University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

Recent Publications

Books:

Stephen Parks, Brian Bailie, Heather Christiansen, Elisabeth Miller, and Morris Young, Eds. The Best of the Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals 2013. Clemson, South Carolina: Parlor Press, 2015.

Mao, LuMing and Morris Young, eds. Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric. Utah State University Press, 2008.

Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship. Studies in Writing and Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.

Editions:

Special Issue. “Beyond Representation: Spatial, Temporal and Embodied Trans/Formations of Asian/Asian American Rhetoric.” enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture 27 (December 2018). http://enculturation.net

Special Issue. “The Transnational Movement of People and Information.” Literacy in Composition Studies 3.3 (October 2015). Co-Editor with Kate Vieira and Rebecca Lorimer Leonard. http://licsjournal.org/OJS/index.php/LiCS/issue/view/10

Articles and Chapters:

“Discourses of Exclusion and the Transformation of Commonplaces for Asian/Americans.” In the Shadows of Democracy: Possibilities for Rhetoric Beyond Rhetorical Studies, eds. Shiben Banerji and Ruben Casas. 17 ms pp. Forthcoming.

“Literacy, Life, and the Intersections of Identity.” Sites of Writing: Essays in Honor of Anne Ruggles Gere. Eds. James Edward Beitler and Sarah Ruffing Robbins. 17 ms pp. Forthcoming.

“On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Representation: Following Villanueva in Challenging Disciplinary and Institutional Racism.” In Memoria: Essays in Honor of Victor Villanueva. Eds., Asao B. Inoue, Siskanna Naynaha, Wendy Olson. Urbana, IL: NCTE Publications, 2024. 241-253.

“Understanding English Composition as a Social Problem: Finding Sterling Andrus Leonard in Rhetoric and Composition.” Lost Texts in Rhetoric and Composition. Ed. Deborah Holdstein. New York: Modern Language Association, 2023. 43-51.

“The Rhetorical Legacies of Chinese Exclusion: Appeals, Protests, and Becoming Chinese American.” Nineteenth-Century American Activist Rhetorics. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Lisa Zimmerelli. New York: Modern Language Association, 2020. 290-303.

Work-in-Progress

“Bodies, Borders, Belonging: Reimagining the Commonplaces of Asian America.” Monograph project in the early stages of development and drafting.

“Interventions: Asian American Rhetorical Activity Across Time and Space.” Co-edited with Amy Wan. MLA Publications. Advance Contract awarded (June 2023); Manuscript in review (July 2024), 297 ms pp.

“Literacy.” The Cambridge History of Rhetoric, Volume V: Modern Rhetoric 1900-. Eds. Daniel M. Gross, Steven J. Mailloux, LuMing Mao. 25 ms pp. In review.

“Reading and Writing Asian/American Commonplaces.” Lit to Lit: Literacy and Literature in Conversation. Eds. Jonathan Alexander and Eli Goldblatt. 16 ms pp. In Review

Courses Taught

My teaching focuses on race and rhetoric, spatial rhetorics, literacies and identities, writing program administration and assessment, literacy studies, language and literacy politics, the teaching of writing, and Asian American literature and culture.

Other

My current project is a co-edited collection (with Amy Wan, Queens College) that considers Asian American rhetorical commonplaces. Other projects in development include an examination of Asian American rhetorical space, focusing specifically on imagined, material, and textual spaces and an anthology of Asian American rhetorical texts, including a range of artifacts, speeches, and primary documents.

Recent Books

  • Young (Co-editor), Morris, and LuMing Mao, Eds. (Co-editor).“Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric.” 2009: n. pag. Print.

    MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize Honorable Mention 2009

    Despite tremendous growth in attention to and scholarship about Asian Americans and their cultural work, little research has emerged that focuses directly on Asian American rhetoric. Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric addresses this need by examining the systematic, effective use of symbolic resources by Asians and Asian Americans in social, cultural, and political contexts. Such rhetoric challenges, disrupts, and transforms the dominant European American rhetoric and it commands a sense of unity or collective identity. However, such rhetoric also embodies internal differences and even contradictions, as each specific communicative situation is informed and inflected by particularizing contexts, by different relations of asymmetry, and, most simply put, by heterogeneous voices. The essays in Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric examine broadly the histories, theories, and practices of Asian American rhetoric, situating rhetorical work across the disciplines where critical study of Asian Americans occurs: Asian American studies, rhetoric and composition, communication studies, and English studies. These essays address the development and adaptation of classical rhetorical concepts such as ethos and memory, modern concepts such as identification, and the politics of representation through a variety of media and cultural texts. As these essays collectively argue, Asian American rhetoric not only reflects and responds to existing social and cultural conditions and practices, but also interacts with and impacts such conditions and practices. To the extent it does, it becomes a rhetoric of becoming–a rhetoric that is always in the process of negotiating with, adjusting to, and yielding an imagined identity and agency that is Asian American.

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  • Through a blend of personal narrative, cultural and literary analysis, and discussions about teaching, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship shows how people of color use reading and writing to develop and articulate notions of citizenship. Morris Young begins with a narration of his own literacy experiences to illustrate the complicated relationship among literacy, race, and citizenship and to reveal the tensions that exist between competing beliefs and uses of literacy among those who are part of dominant American culture and those who are positioned as minorities. Influenced by the literacy narratives of other writers of color, Young theorizes an Asian American rhetoric by examining the rhetorical construction of American citizenship in works such as Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s “Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” from Woman Warrior. These narratives, Young shows, tell stories of transformation through education, the acquisition of literacy, and cultural assimilation and resistance. They also offer an important revision to the American story by inserting the minor and creating a tension amid dominant discourses about literacy, race, and citizenship. Through a consideration of the literacy narratives of Hawaii, Young also provides a context for reading literacy narratives as responses to racism, linguistic discrimination, and attempts at “othering” in a particular region. As we are faced with dominant discourses that construct race and citizenship in problematic ways and as official institutions become even more powerful and prevalent in silencing minor voices, Minor Re/Visions reveals the critical need for revising minority and dominant discourses. Young’s observations and conclusions have important implications for the ways rhetoricians and compositionists read, teach, and assign literacy narratives.

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