Global Rhetoric and the Practice of Transnational Literacies 2012/10/08 Western States Rhetoric and Literacy Studies. October 19-20, 2012 Globalization studies is gradually coming to recognize that "urgent global questions" are "rhetorically situated" (Bahri 524) and to see that situatedness as complicated by transnational circulation and performance. These recognitions are prompting new questions about "technological, political, and education-institutional" processes (McLaughlin 119), the nature of global publics, and the methods needed to study these effectively. When the rhetoric of mobility is privileged over that of meaning, how can mobility be read and what happens to more traditional questions such as the following: What imagery, metaphors, and rhetoric characterize the transnational? What relation do these bear to national and global imaginaries? What cultural work do they do? What kind of literacies do they promote? What kind of illiteracies do they produce and what kind do they condone? For example, how does one address Dana A. Williams and Marissa K. Lopez's concern about "the various ways ethnic literatures are rendered "illiterate" or unreadable" (357)? Other writers express concern about the ways in which they are commodified within the global marketplace (Lai; Martin-Lucas). These questions are now prompting others. At a time when it seems that neoliberal globalization is creating what Spivak describes as "a time and place that has privatized the imagination and pitted it against the political" (37-38), how can we follow her lead in keeping "responsibility alive in the reading and teaching of the textual" (101-102)? How does one study the role