Vani Kannan

This dissertation focuses on the work of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), a women-of-color-led activist organization that maintained active chapters in New York City and the Bay Area between 1971-80. Drawing on archival research and qualitative interviews, I reconstruct how the group invoked, constructed, and circulated intersecting Third World histories and geopolitical analyses through political education, publications, and cultural events. In addition to this historical study, I seek to understand the ongoing presence of the TWWA in educational spaces through interviews with archivists and professors across disciplines. This project makes three contributions to the field of Rhetoric and Composition: 1) offering a genealogy of the rhetoric and writing from the era that Cynthia Young refers to as the U.S. Third World Left; 2) demonstrating how the TWWA’s work--and U.S. Third World rhetoric and writing more broadly--blurs scales that are often treated as discrete in Rhetoric...

This dissertation focuses on the work of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), a women-of-color-led activist organization that maintained active chapters in New York City and the Bay Area between 1971-80. Drawing on archival research and qualitative interviews, I reconstruct how the group invoked, constructed, and circulated intersecting Third World histories and geopolitical analyses through political education, publications, and cultural events. In addition to this historical study, I seek to understand the ongoing presence of the TWWA in educational spaces through interviews with archivists and professors across disciplines. This project makes three contributions to the field of Rhetoric and Composition: 1) offering a genealogy of the rhetoric and writing from the era that Cynthia Young refers to as the U.S. Third World Left; 2) demonstrating how the TWWA’s work--and U.S. Third World rhetoric and writing more broadly--blurs scales that are often treated as discrete in Rhetoric...

This article traces the labor of archiving the papers of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA)--a multiracial women’s organization that grew out of the Civil Rights/Black Power movements and maintained active chapters in NYC and the Bay Area during the 1970s. By focusing on the labor of archiving, I take a lead from the methodologies of social-movement scholars in rhetoric and writing who orient to the behind-the-scenes labor of organizing, and the everyday textual labor of building movements and preserving movement histories (Leon; Monberg). My embodied experiences as a cross-disciplinary teacher/scholar of rhetoric and composition and women’s and gender studies, and organizer who prioritizes behind-the-scenes, feminized labor like internal document preparation and childcare—orient me to the labor that scaffolds more public-facing work like publishing theory and speaking publicly. Drawing on an interview with Sharon Davenport, who processed the TWWA’s archives, this article situa...

This dissertation focuses on the work of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), a women-of-color-led activist organization that maintained active chapters in New York City and the Bay Area between 1971-80. Drawing on archival research and qualitative interviews, I reconstruct how the group invoked, constructed, and circulated intersecting Third World histories and geopolitical analyses through political education, publications, and cultural events. In addition to this historical study, I seek to understand the ongoing presence of the TWWA in educational spaces through interviews with archivists and professors across disciplines. This project makes three contributions to the field of Rhetoric and Composition: 1) offering a genealogy of the rhetoric and writing from the era that Cynthia Young refers to as the U.S. Third World Left; 2) demonstrating how the TWWA’s work--and U.S. Third World rhetoric and writing more broadly--blurs scales that are often treated as discrete in Rhetoric...

Over sixty years following the 1948 plane crash that had inspired Woody Guthrie’s “Deportees,” a poem subsequently set to music by Martin Hoffman, poet and novelist Tim Z. Hernandez began to locate the real names of the deceased passengers, and worked with the families of the “deportees” to design a memorial headstone. On Labor Day 2013, the headstone was unveiled. At the ceremony, California musician Lance Canales and his band, the Flood, played a new version of Guthrie and Hoffman’s song. Canales describes re-writing the song within an entirely new set of musical conventions, from his own subject-position as the grandson of a migrant farmworker, imagining that he was descended from someone killed in the crash. This essay investigates Guthrie’s composition of “Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)”, Martin Hoffman’s musical arrangement, Hernandez’s research, and Canales’s re-writing of the song, positioning the song in relation to the history — and present reality — that it has narr...

This article shares an upper-division writing course's struggle to be accountable to both the #MeToo movement and the fight for Ethnic Studies in Tucson. These movements collided in our class after we planned a campus screening of the film PRECIOUS KNOWLEDGE, which chronicles the student-led movement to save the Tucson High School Mexican American studies program, and then received news that the director had sexually assaulted one of the student-activists in the film. In this article, collaboratively-written by the professor teaching the course and two students in it, we share our accountability process, and concrete methods for social-movement-accountability in the writing classroom.