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An Imagined America presents a historical, transnational, translingual, and decolonial perspective on questions of identity, literacy, language, culture, and citizenship. In examining a variety of English- and Arabic-language archival documents from the founding of Syrian Protestant College in 1866 (today the American University of Beirut) until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920, Lisa R. Arnold shows how transnational and translingual negotiations among faculty, students, and administrators, as well as the local and regional community, produced a tenuous and sometimes unsettling vision of America for foreigners and locals alike. As her account shows, transnational and translingual discourses provide the backdrop and motive for the assertion of coloniality in contexts of literacy education such as that of Syrian Protestant College. An Imagined America allows scholars and educators in rhetoric and writing studies, education, and related fields to consider how literacy education in English has, and often continues to, construct an imagined America that is both grounded on and reproduces colonial epistemology. Such constructions work to uphold exclusionary practices that are all too vivid in our world today.
Lisa R. Arnold is Associate Professor of English at North Dakota State University and was previously a faculty member at the American University of Beirut. Her research interests include the history of writing instruction worldwide, global rhetorics, transnational writing practices and pedagogy, and writing program administration. She has been published in a range of writing studies journals including College Composition and Communication, College English, Composition Studies, Journal of Writing Assessment, Research in the Teaching of English, and Pedagogy as well as in multiple edited collections. She is also the co-editor of Emerging Writing Research from the Middle East-North Africa Region (The WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado, 2017).