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Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. By Krista Ratcliffe. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005; pp xiii + 225. $60.00 cloth; $30.00 paper.
Krista Ratcliffe begins her book by stating her simple purpose: "This book argues that listening should be revived within rhetoric and composition studies via a concept of rhetorical listening" (1). However, the book's theoretical explication and compelling case studies are a wonderfully complex addition to rhetorical studies. Ratcliffe begins the book with an honest account of her previous inability to confront whiteness in her scholarship and teaching. She contends that nothing in her education had prepared her to recognize or articulate whiteness. Thus she had no strategies for resisting certain versions of whiteness that may privilege some and oppress others. To attend to this dilemma, she revisits work by influential feminist, philosophical, and rhetorical scholars. She contends that rhetorical listening may be employed to hear people's intersecting identifications with gender and race to facilitate cross-cultural communication on any topic.
Hers is a lofty project but also one, as she correctly argues, that contributes to rhetorical literature, which has long overlooked listening in favor of theoretical approaches to the written and spoken word (19). Indeed, the book convincingly argues that rhetorical listening would affect the lives of citizens, scholars, and teachers if only we took it more...