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Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures

DAMIÁN BACA

Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Syracuse University

Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures
Michigan State University
242 Bessey Hall
East Lansing, Michigan 48824

517/355-3279 (office); 517/353-5250 (fax) baca@msu.edu
http://www.msu.edu/~baca/

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teaching interests: rhetorics and literatures of American Latinidad, comparative technologies of writing, globalization and subaltern studies, ancestral language pedagogy

courses: WRA 361: Rhetoric, Argument and Persuasion; WRA 125: Writing American Ethnic and Racial Experience; ENG 360: Postcolonial Literature and Theory

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Baca works at the intersection of rhetoric, “subaltern” studies, and globalization. Generally, he looks to cultures across Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latinidad as a lens through which to complicate and inform two correlative domains of inquiry:

the disciplinary formation of the study of written language as it emerges during a crucial period of Western territorial annexation, and

the complicity between ethnic identity and economy, from the development of the Trans-Atlantic commercial circuit in the sixteenth century to the present stage of late global capitalism.

Baca’s publications have recently appeared in Dialogue: A Journal for Writing Specialists; An Introduction to Authorship: A Guide for Teachers and Scholars of Composition and Rhetoric (2004); and Encyclopedia of Latinas and Latinos in the United States (2004). His manuscript, ReWorlding Rhetoric: Intersecting Indigenist@, IndoHispana/o, and Mexican Rhetorics in America, co-written with Dora RamÍrez, is currently under review.

Baca is currently writing a book on present-day IndoHispano codices, post-Columbian manuscripts in which pictorial and alphabetic inscription systems converge. These contemporary textual variations are reinterpretations of the earlier forms produced between 1000 and 1521 by Mixtec and Zapotec dynasties in Oaxaca. Mexican-Amerindian intertextuality, a central theme in Baca’s work, provokes the recognition of competing yet interwoven literacies. Thus, cumulative and comparative technologies of writing in Mesoamerica/later America guide his research and teaching. Baca is also an affiliate faculty with the Chicano/Latino Studies Program.