Class Politics: The Movement for the Students' Right to Their Own Language. Refiguring English Studies

This book relates the story of the 1974 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) resolution on Students' Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL), and sets this up against the story of how Composition Studies developed as a professional field and sets both against the larger history of 1960s movements, the liberal welfare state, and the Cold War. The first half of the book examines how the term "student" organized the activities of organizations such as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panthers. The second half of the book studies how the political, scholarly, and organizational work around student politics produced the resolution on Students' Right to Their Own Language. After a foreword by Richard Ohmann and an introduction, chapters in the book are: (1) "Tracking the Student"; (2) "New Left Politics and the Process Movement"; (3) "Black Power/Black English"; (4) (4) "Locking Horns: The NUC Encounters the MLA [Modern Language Association], NCTE [National Council of Teachers of English], and CCCC, 1968-1972"; (5) "The Students' Right to Their Own Language, 1972-1974"; and (6) "A Coup d'Etat and Love Handles, 1974-1983." A concluding chapter, "Ozymandias--Creating a Program for the SRTOL," discusses how a version of community-based critical pedagogy can produce a composition studies focused on issues of social justice and progressive politics. The first appendix provides the entire text for the resolution on language adopted by members of the CCCC in April 1974; the background statement explaining and supporting that resolution; and a 129-item bibliography. Appendix 2 presents "The fourth and final draft of the report of the CCCC Committee on the Advisability of a Language Statement for the 1980s and 1990s." (RS)