While much has been said about individualized rhetorical practice, a unifying theory about how writing functions to animate communities has yet to be articulated. Furthermore, the connection between cultural rhetorics and a theory of writing has yet to be further explored. The dissertation analyzes various texts created outside the university to form a reading strategy that will help understand how decoloniality, relationality, materiality, and cultural rhetorics converge to provide material changes to the public beyond the classroom. This reading strategy focuses on understanding what makes texts produced by activists to animate communities particularly effective. The dissertation examines how the self-published newspapers written by the Young Lords exemplifies writing’s ability to animate communities. Through inductive analysis, I examine how Indigenous rhetorical practice engaged in by the Young Lords was particularly useful in effecting material change in their immediate communities. This reading strategy asks readers to identify if a text contemporizes relations, pursues materiality, and considers contextuality. Utilizing these strategies informs a cultural rhetorics theory of writing in which writers affect the nature of writing through their attunement to these practices. Additionally, this reading strategy exemplifies how politics, or how the mechanisms by which the public exercises its power over governing structures, relates to the practice of rhetoric.
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