No abstract
The International Exchanges on the Study of Writing Series publishes booklength manuscripts that address worldwide perspectives on writing, writers, teaching with writing, and scholarly writing practices, specifically those that draw on scholarship across national and disciplinary borders to challenge parochial understandings of all of the above. The series aims to examine writing activities in 21st-century contexts, particularly how they are informed by globalization, national identity, social networking, and increased cross-cultural communication and awareness. As such, the series strives to investigate how both the local and the international inform writing research and the facilitation of writing development.The WAC Clearinghouse, Colorado State University Open Press, and University Press of Colorado are collaborating so that these books will be widely available through free digital distribution and low-cost print editions. The publishers and the Series editors are committed to the principle that knowledge should freely circulate. We see the opportunities that new technologies have for further democratizing knowledge. And we see that to share the power of writing is to share the means for all to articulate their needs, interest, and learning into the great experiment of literacy.
This article follows the academic literacy learning trajectory of Farah, an undergraduate anthropology major at the American University in Cairo. In charting her path from the Egyptian public schooling system to a Western-based transnational university, this study offers a perspective in which a writer created and navigated a challenging trajectory and adapted Western-based literacies to aid in the development of an academic and professional agenda based in personal and national interests. This article draws on frameworks in composition studies and transnational literacy studies to suggest that theorizing such trajectories may require new concepts that can account for literacy learning trajectories for writers like Farah.
LITTLE MISTER UTAH My mother sometimes like to tell me why she's famous. Usually it's late on some weekend night, or after drinks at The Lasso after work, when she comes home fumbling with her keys, pressing her weight against the plastic door of our trailer, literally falling into our little home, all warm in the winter, and I'll hand her the hot cup of tea I've had steeping for an hour, keeping it warm with occasional shots from the microwave, until it's dark green and thick. She plops down on that plush chair that predates me, and she will point to the once-glossy poster of David Lee Roth, that first guy to headline and sing for Van Halen, which she's attached to the wall above our television, and she will go on about her days as a groupie. I always curl myself into the droopy corner of our couch, the end closest to her, and cup my own tea and listen to her wild tales of adventure and what she did when she was a younger, happier woman. Brady, she says, and I only let her call me Brady at twelve, everybody else calls me Brandon, have I ever told you about me and David? She has, she's told me a million times, but I know she wants me to hear it for the first time again, so I nod the negative and she goes on about the years she spent traveling with Van Halen when they were just a club band, before they hit it big in the eighties, when David was still their front man-to mention Sammy Hagar in this house is blasphemy-and she traveled alongside the band in a black Pinto with two other groupies, and the competition was fierce! They all wanted David, she says, but show after show he always went with other women. But they carried on, undeterred, and they took mental notes and spiked their hair higher, tightened those skirts and cropped them closer to their rear ends, anything so that David would see them late in the concert, screaming in the front row, looking up to the great god David and his long sandy hair and spandex bodysuits and white teeth-my mom literally cringes here, the mind-image of David so great and vivid, like he's right here with us-until one night at a small show in Nevada he did see her, and he liked what he saw, yes, yes indeed. But it was a small show that night, she says, her mouth corners drooping in doubt, what if he just settled? This is where I come in, always. Mom, I say, you are a beautiful woman now, and I am sure that you were stunning back then, all decked out and dressed up like you were. It was only a matter of him seeing you, I tell her, and she accepts the comfort, nodding her head in my direction and sipping from her tea-green tea, I should note, good for one's immune system-and finishing the story: David nodded to a security man at the side, who swooped over to my mother and placed a backstage pass around her neck, and only an hour or two later, after mingling backstage and trying coke and finally getting David alone, did she finally sleep with him. February 26, 1975. She mercifully spares me the details each time, instead falling off into some nostalgia-hued dream, her narrative trai...
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