Imagining Literacy : Rhizomes of Knowledge in American Culture and Literature

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"There are many wonderful things about this book . . . all of which indicate a scholar at the cutting-edge of her field. . . . Indeed, Fernandez's analysis of the ideological trappings of literacy is truly first-rate and illuminating on many counts, especially for those of us concerned with the uses and implications of multiculturalism and its consequent backlash across the curriculum."--Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Assistant Professor of Chicana/o Studies, University of California, Los AngelesDefining the "common knowledge" a "literate" person should possess has provoked intense debate ever since the publication of E. D. Hirsch's controversial book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Yet the basic concept of "common knowledge," Ramona Fernandez argues, is a Eurocentric model ill-suited to a society composed of many distinct cultures and many local knowledges.In this book, Fernandez decodes the ideological assumptions that underlie prevailing models of cultural literacy as she offers new ways of imagining and modeling mixed cultural and non-print literacies. In particular, she challenges the biases inherent in the "encyclopedias" of knowledge promulgated by E. D. Hirsch and others, by Disney World's EPCOT Center, and by the Smithsonian Institution. In contrast to these, she places the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Leslie Marmon Silko, whose works model a cultural literacy that weaves connections across many local knowledges and many ways of knowing.