This piece of writing was created for my WRA 805: Rhetoric Theory and History course taught by Dr. Stuart Blythe. Out of all the pieces of writing in this portfolio, this is simultaneously the one I knew I needed to include the most and the one I wanted my committee to read the least. This bashfulness is born from that fact that this is the first researched essay I wrote while at Michigan State University. At the time of writing this essay I was not familiar with the field as a whole and even less with what was considered a part of the canon. Additionally, I had yet to find a writing style in which I felt comfortable writing.
The prompt for this assignment was to choose a person, text, or series of texts and make an argument as to why they belong within the canon of rhetorical history. I chose one of Puerto Rico’s national poets, the great Julia de Burgos and argued that she was a great exemplar of a master rhetorician going by a different name. My main goal in choosing her was to resist against the inherent colonialism imbued into the current canon of rhetoric due to its current lack of diversity. The essay can read clunky at times, and there are many moments in which I’m hinting at ideas for which I have no vocabulary to describe yet. I was trying to talk about genre, about code-switching, and about how Julia de Burgos mastered both of those in order to gain a voice within a world that would have her be silent on account of being Black and on account of being a woman. Even with all of its flaws, this essay does a good job of showing my first attempt at integrating Puerto Rico into the field of rhetoric, something that would become characteristic of all the research I would continue to do in the program.