ABOUT THIS BOOK

Winner, 2019 CCCC Outstanding Book Award

Honorable Mention, 2018 Coalition of the Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition Winifred Bryan Horner Award

In this book, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard shows how multilingual migrant women both succeed and struggle in their writing contexts. Based on a qualitative study of everyday multilingual writers in the United States, she shows how migrants’ literacies are revalued because they move with writers among their different languages and around the world. Writing on the Move builds a theory of literate valuation, in which socioeconomic values shape how multilingual migrant writers do or do not move forward in their lives. The book details the complicated reality of multilingual literacy, which is lived at the nexus of prejudice, prestige, and power.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Rebecca Lorimer Leonard is assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

REVIEWS

“How is literacy revalued as it moves across borders and boundaries? What forms does literate mobility take? What functions does the process of literate valuation perform? Refreshingly insightful and profoundly original, Writing on the Move offers an indispensable framework for theorizing about these questions and for understanding how competing social and economic forces shape, recognize, and regulate migrant literate lives.”
—LuMing Mao, Miami University

“Writing on the Move is an important contribution to transnational literacy studies. It not only complicates our understanding of literate repertoires performed in everyday life by migrant women with rich and resonant lives; it also extends our vocabulary of motive by critically examining how fixity, friction, and fluidity inform their literate values. A must-read in a time of great peril for immigrants in the United States.”
—Juan C. Guerra, University of Washington at Seattle

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface: Traveling Literacies

Introduction: Why Writing Matters

Chapter 1. Studying Writing on the Move

Chapter 2. Fluidity: When Writing Moves

Chapter 3. Fixity: When Writing Stalls

Chapter 4. Friction: When Writing Stalls in Motion

Chapter 5. Deep Contradictions in the Value of Literacy

Appendixes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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