“You are what you eat,” but what if you’re seen as a rat eater, bat lover, or MSG user? In Inscrutable Eating, Jennifer Lin LeMesurier considers how everyday assumptions about Asian food influence the perception of Asian and Asian American identity within the US racial landscape, demonstrating that beliefs about how certain people eat are inseparable from attitudes that support hierarchies around race, gender, and sexuality. 

Drawing on rhetorical theory, affect theory, and Asian American studies, LeMesurier analyzes messages in US popular culture about Asian eating to develop the concept of gut orientations: rhetorically dominant ways of interacting with food that scale upward to feelings of desire and disgust toward social groups. Looking at examples from fears around MSG to uproar over wet markets as the source of COVID-19, she argues that these “gut” reactions establish certain racial views as common-sense truths rather than cultural biases, reinforcing dominant norms about what belongs on whose plate, or who belongs at what table. In demystifying marginalizing discourse around food and eating, LeMesurier shows how exposing the tacit, felt ideas of consumption is necessary to contest broader forms of discrimination.

What if rhetoric and climate are intimately connected? Taking climates to be rhetorical and rhetoric to be climatic, A Reading Group offers a generative framework for making sense of rhetorical studies as they grapple with the challenges posed by antiracist, decolonial, affective, ecological, and more-than-human scholarship to a tradition with a long history of being centered around individual, usually privileged, human agents wielding language as their principal instrument. Understanding the atmospheric and ambient energies of rhetoric underscores the challenges and promises of trying to heal a harmed world from within it. A cowritten “multigraph,” which began in 2018 as a reading group, this book enacts an intimate, mutualistic spirit of shared critical inquiry and play—an exciting new way of doing, thinking, and feeling rhetorical studies by six prominent scholars in rhetoric from communication and English departments alike.

The performing and visual arts have much to offer writing studies in terms of process, creativity, design, delivery, and habits of mind (and body). This collection is intended for teachers and researchers of writing in and across the disciplines, in both secondary and post-secondary settings, and for those outside of writing studies who wish to infuse more writing into their performing and visual arts curriculums and courses. Filled with evocative images and vivid descriptions, contributors showcase ways of knowing and doing in the performing and visual arts. Contributors also offer teachers in the performing and visual arts go-to practical designs and strategies for teaching writing in their fields.