Agency in the Margins

Book excerpt: "This collection of essays studies the rhetoric of Otherness and explores how outsiders to mainstream sites for rhetorical participation find ways to make themselves heard while retaining marginal identities. The question that this collection answers is: how do people who are defined as outsiders create agency-- how do they become agents of change, of social, political, spiritual, and cultural power-- outside of those spaces that we traditionally understand as belonging to the powerful? This collection brings to light the many different ways that politically or socially marginalized people use discourse to garner, access, undermine, or overturn power-- to make themselves seen and heard."--Jacket.