ABSTRACT
Throughout the course of his career, Victor Villanueva has critiqued the nuanced ways that rhetoric can reinforce cultural, linguistic, and racial hegemony. He has approached this task as a true rhetorician—using highly stylized rhetoric as a means to examine that hegemony. Villanueva’s rhetorical virtuosity plays a prominent role in the nearly 50 articles and chapters he has written and is most evident in his award winning autobiography Bootstraps, From an American Academic of Color (1993). In Bootstraps, Villanueva employs the digressive Spanish-Arab rhetorical style to frame his personal narrative and to confront the English language–based sociocultural hegemony that is embedded within the discipline of rhetoric and composition, a move which was a first for the field.
