Teaching and Studying Transnational Composition

Book excerpt: Transnational composition is a site for engaging with difference across populations, economies, languages, and borders and for asking how cultures, languages, and national imaginaries interanimate one another. Organized in three parts, the book addresses the transnational in composition in scholarship, teaching, and administration. It brings together contributions from institutional, geopolitical, and cultural contexts ranging across North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Caribbean and covers writing in English, Chinese, multiple European languages, Latin American Spanish, African and West Indian Creoles, and Guianan French. Exploring the relationship among transnational, international, global, and translingual approaches to composition--while complicating the term composition itself--essays draw on theories of border work, mobility, liminality, cross-border interaction, center-periphery contours, superdiversity, and transnational rhetoric and address, among other topics, models of cognitive processing, principles of universal design, and frames of critical literacy awareness.